When we first started our family hunting journey we had no clue what we were getting ourselves into.
We had moved to a new area and didn’t know these mountains as well as the ones back home. We began the season mountain hopping and would hunt a different place each weekend with zero luck.
It wasn’t until we decided to put our heads together and make a game plan that things changed. Have you ever heard if you fail to plan, you plan to fail? Well, we certainly planned to fail our first season out because we were hopping all over from hell to breakfast trying to find anything at all.
When we are weekend warriors and can’t be on the mountain everyday, we sometimes get hung up on if we don’t find anything there must be nothing here and we move on to the next. That’s all fine and dandy, but it isn’t very effective. You can’t try something once and fail + never try again right? You just take a different approach.
The biggest tip we have when learning a new area is to learn it well. Make a plan to learn each area like the back of your hand and commit to hunting only one location that entire month if you can only go out on the weekends. Learn all of the roads, trails, and canyons well.
Now, if you can go out daily, then hunt that hillside for a week or two straight and if you still aren’t having any luck, then head somewhere else.
The thing is when it comes to chasing bear or lion, you have to learn to rely on your dog’s nose + have confidence in that. It’s a team sport so you also want to make sure your dog knows what it’s after as well…. We’ve had our share of deer chases!
If there are bears on the mountain you pick, eventually they will fall into their typical behavioral patterns and you’ll find them.
Upgraded maps like the Garmin Huntview Plus, or the OnX Hunt Map can be a valuable asset when trying to find game. The ability to E-Scout can really help pattern game in new ground before you even get there.
You get tired of the frustration of not finding anything, seeing your hubs put all the pressure on himself, and the long days in the truck with all the kids.
Making a plan paid off the first time we planned and although we only caught one bear each weekend that month, that was a HUGE success in our book!
Dustin’s goal was to catch a bear with only his dogs that year and he did it + got his family to a tree. You can have that same win if you set a goal and make a plan as to how you are going to reach it.
The thing is and this is just my thinking, but when you mountain hop because you didn’t find a bear that week, what if it just so happened to wander on over the next and now you didn’t find it because you moved to the location it just left and you do this every single weekend yet wonder why you aren’t finding a thing.
That was the logic I had behind deciding what to do because in all reality, bears do move, but they seem to circle the same area over + over especially if they have everything they need right there. So, if you stick to one area long enough, you’re gonna find something unless there truly is nothing there.
It’s a game of finding a needle in a haystack with a lot of ground to cover. Sometimes it gets overwhelming when we are hiking and you look out and think of how much mountain there is and how you can’t search it all in one day.
It is putting one foot in front of the other each day, sticking to the same area for a session, and you’ll start finding success. That’s when it gets really fun!
See ya on the mountain,
The ColdStrike Fam
