Well, unfortunately we ended up not getting everybody out of the house in time to have enough time to work our way up the hill. Had to settle for sticking around the low area till shooting light before working our way up after not seeing anything.
After we ascended, we identified some excellent saddles for next time, and saw several does crossing them. I shot a yearling, which ordinarily I wouldn't do, but the circumstances were particularly tough. I was going to take what I could get.
There had been some snowfall a couple of days prior; at some point between then and the day of the hunt, the snow melted in the canopies, forming icicles. But when the sun hit them the day before our hunt, the icicles came loose, shattering on the forest floor where the sun doesn't shine much of the day. As a result, the forest floor was absolutely covered with ice shards (from a distance, it looked like snow all over the forest, but was actually ice), and every step we took sounding like crushing glass. You can imagine how hard it was to sneak up on anything.
My dad and I decided it was best to ascend all the way to the "laurel line" near the top of the main ridge, in the hopes that being above where the deer are bedded would be better for dissipating the sound of the ice underfoot, perhaps giving us a chance to get a shot. We were also stopping a lot more often, and for longer periods of time, than we had in years past. When we came to a point where the laurel line jutted out to form a "peninsula" surrounded by big woods/mature timber on all but the uphill side, we decided to slowly go straight through instead of around it. Just before we reached the edge of the laurel cover, the yearling made a break for it down a "superhighway" holler-forming ridge from somewhere either straight ahead and level with us or slightly uphill. It stopped about 85 yards away, and I fired an offhand shot into its shoulder for a DRT kill (I had been aiming for the center of the vitals just behind/under the shoulder...so giving myself the wide margin of error by not going for a shoulder or heart from the get-go paid off). On such a small target at that range, with an older Remington trigger, you can imagine how much I had to focus on trigger pull!
Dad later bagged a more mature doe.
Because we were taking the deer back to Tennessee the next day, and the new regulations forbid "importing" any cervid bones from any state that has documented cases of CWD (and Virginia is one of them), we had to de-bone the deer ourselves. It was my first time doing it, therefore slow going, but it was ultimately marvelously rewarding. I don't think we're ever going back to a processor. Got a vacuum sealer, and going to be on the lookout for a grinder for the "scraps," front shoulder/shanks, and neck meat.