Creek Bends: Winter offers slick ways to explore
Nothing beats a layer of white stuff for revealing wildlife trails and landscape features
The longest drive to Snake Creek so far this year felt the shortest.
It was only the first week of February so there’s a little joke there but just go with it.
Even as the concentration of the prior day’s “thunder sleet” narrowed the highway to two faint dark lines behind an old sedan driving 20 mph with emergency flashers on, my mind was well ahead, already on the 40 acres, with a mental checklist of things to see.
Even as I stopped on the gravel county road to slap on my nearly pristine tire chains—the ones used so seldom the paper tags still are like-new—my head was in the dense brushy area along the creek and glassing the view from high on the ridge.
Winter, after deer season and while trapping season still is open, is a fantastic time to “see” a landscape. Snow makes tracking wildlife easier, frozen sleet is not as good but tracks do show in the scattered soft spots, and creek and fence crossings stand out like pedestrian crossing signs along a busy street.
Tall grasses are collapsed, the brush is crushed, leaves are gone and a coating of just an inch or two reveals the main game trails like white grout between so many misshapen brown tiles.
I love a day when I can sit on a high ridge with binoculars and spot splotches of deer droppings in trails 100 yards distant.
Going out for winter scouting, maybe best described as a time for a winter walkabout, is a fantastic way to get to know the lay of the land, but some caution is advised in putting too much stock in specific movements observed, particularly with deer. Things are very different in February, compared to October and November, unless December brings temperatures in the teens with a 20mph north wind, and thunder. It can happen.
Because the property is just 40 acres and dense brush is limited at the moment, I would have been extremely surprised to find any deer bedded on the property mid-day with a storm approaching—especially because it was approaching about 2 hours earlier than I planned.
I knew several of the does and youngsters, the remaining dominant buck on the ridge visited a mineral and protein block I have in front of the trail camera for the post-season inventory and then likely retreated to a favored spot of deep cover to wait out the storms.
I had a pretty good idea where that was, and I have had for some time a pretty good idea that the biggest bucks retreat to that off-property region.
What has escaped me the past year, with the two large bucks, was where, exactly, they cross onto the property. I have yet to set a perimeter camera on a trail that catches them as they enter and exit. I am an ace at finding does and young bucks, apparently.
On a smaller property, those crossings become more and more important as the season drags on and center-property trail cameras are showing the deer a half hour before or after legal shooting times.
I need to find a spot or two, some approachable and strategic spots, closer to bedding and loafing areas that likely are not on the property, or just at its edge.
As many times as I have been with other hunters on areas managed for big bucks and watched, and even filmed, big bucks coming in later, behind the does, behind the younger bucks, and on the same trails, these Snake Creek buggers just have me completely fooled.
It’s just a puzzle I need to solve, and day with main trails highlighted and lesser trails lightly traced, the fence crossings and creek crossings would give me clues even a dunce can see.
Tracks of the largest buck took me in the direction I expected, but definitely not on the route I’d guessed. In two places he crossed from one trail to another that required small jumps over downed trees. Unlike other well-used trails where the green briar and buck brush are nibbled, his route meandered. It snaked through dense trees but crossed wide-open nothingness as well.
It also went straight down Ass-Buster Ridge, as I call it, and not at much of an angle, not at a gentle side-hill descent along the game trail I’ve walked, but straight bust-your-butt-slip-a-hip-break-your-neck down the hill.
I walked a half-mile out of my way to get around that drop. I’m sure-footed but I do realize I’m 60 years old and things don’t heal up quickly as they used to. I almost slid down the ridge on my backside, but even thought better of that.
Besides, I had a good idea of where he was going.
Except I was wrong.
At the base of the ridge, I walked back and forth and found the areas where the little fawn poops pile up and the heavier does walk past a camera I have set there, but that heavier, bigger set of lone tracks was nowhere to be found.
Sleet began to salt the landscape, streak my eyeglasses, and thunder rolled, I pulled up my hood and zipped my rain jacket. I tried to walk up the ridge, but it was impossible. If I wasn’t slipping on the ice a rock was rolling out from under my boot.
I dropped to my hands and knees and grabbed saplings in an attempt to work my way back up Ass Buster to intersect that buck’s tracks.
And then my phone buzzed.
“Are you on your way home?” my wife had texted.
I checked the weather radar, again. The wind picked up. The thunder rolled. The sleet began to feel more like small hail.
There I sat, legs flat and splayed like a 5-year-old in a sandbox, the friction of my coveralls holding me up on the steep icy ridge.
“Aa-a-cck!” I yelled.
Then I looked down again at the weather app.
“Well.”
“Crap.”
It was going to be a long drive home.
Perfect description of wandering the woods in this weather. Frozen sleet is unusual and the tracks were hard to find. The way the sleet settled into all the game trails made an interesting view of the landscape. Watch out! this old guy also slid down a few hills. Watch out but, also, stay out...and keep writing.