Sky Island junkie

Good luck!

Yep gonna be pretty dense out there this season! Was out this morning checking for water gaps and couldn’t believe the wait a minute had grown 3’ in the last few weeks and grasses were 4-5’ tall in low areas. My eyes were itching and I was wheezing by 9 o’clock but I loved it!

Works very well on the the younger ones especially. I can’t see the video real clearly but assuming mom with a couple cubs

Yeah I think they communicate better than they used to with ranchers and farmers. The one I got called on 15 years ago was an any elk depredation in the Gila valley. 5 tag holders saw nothing. One farmer laughed when he told me we were a little late! I took that as they had a full freezer!

Using the word hunt loosely!

That sounds like AZG$F. Sometimes they’ve been late to the party with the depredation. More than once a group of farmers or ranchers have petitioned them to conduct a depredation and they drag their feet. By the time they create tags and sell them to the recipients the problem has been taken care of. Nothing for them to shoot. Rumor has it!!

I believe that to be true. 3c blew up in numbers after the rodeo fire and 1 and 27 after the wallow.

If you think there are too many wt now, you would have crapped your pants in the 70s and 80s

30-40 years ago we’d see bachelor groups of 6-8 velvet bucks in unit 1 when fishing up there. We camped at Wynn for a few days and had a group of bucks feeding within 100 yards of camp with not a care while we cooked burgers. So wasn’t surprised to see 8 on the ground yesterday.

Yeah there will always be trophies found and killed. Those monsters lived then as well, probably many more. Truth be told how many of the monsters nowadays are killed by a posse of guys with 150k of optics and atvs etc. But anyhow, my good old days comment came fresh off of last year where I put my wife and myself in separate for non premium wt tags in so az and couldn’t get one tag. First time in over 30 years. Yeah gimme some cheese with my whine!

I can’t speak for unit 1 but as for the units I hunted as a youngster I believe the numbers and quality was a lot higher then and if I only knew then what I know now.....

Yeah a lot of tags I’m sure like all over the place. If I remember right something like 2300 Muley tags in unit 8 in the early 80s Someone will tell me if I’m wrong. Used to be a camp every 50 yards on the main road around Bill Williams mountain but most of those were road hunters that were gone by Sunday afternoon. You could easily get away from them and have an area to yourself. Now you go to the trouble to hike in somewhere up north and there might be an atv drive right in on top of you on a trail that wasn’t there the last time I was 20 years ago. I guess kinda getting off on a different subject!

When I said to my dad in the early 80s that I wished I could have grown up in the good old days and he said son these are the good old days! Wow was he right!!

That would be the right thing to do in my opinion but G$F is going let us compete for the critters with the more profitable otc and harvest objective thing.

I’ve always welcomed and laughed at road hunters for the same reason but to the serious hunter whose hunt will be cut short because a bunch of yearlings have been shot on the road and closing his unit, yeah I believe there will be some unhappy dudes the first year of this new system.

Wounded or fatally shot and not recovered. Probably quite a few. Already heard of one not far from my place that a guy made a good shot on and didn’t want to wait too long so only gave him 10 mins and the blood was already washed away. After 2 hours of searching through vegetation, on to the next one! I guess that’s a good reason for the harvest objective to only be 5 in our unit! Maybe that will make an impact on Mule deer numbers

Been a stellar summer monsoon this year with a little over 11 inches at our place in So Az. We’ve been fighting mud every other day on job sites for the last 3 weeks and has been frustrating too. Sucks to give up a tag because we’ve gotten so much of what we cry for!

Yeah lot of tags in there but most of the pressure is close to the roads. Just look for a bit more rugged country that your average out of shape hunter won’t go into and hike a mile or so into it and it’s a game changer.

I did exactly that in a pinch years ago. I was trying to pull a guy out in a high boy Chevy with my skid steer. His wife was watching and said the drop hitch was flexing! I got out and it had bent it a tad, we were lucky because my dumb butt would have kept yanking! Our guess was the pin was the better bet too. Not ideal but worked. A lot of hitches are only 3/16 square tube. No match for putting that kind of force at the bottom of a drop hitch!

Yeah huevos grande indeed!!

Everyone gets a trophy!

Yep and probably a good portion of tag holders don’t even make the hunt. Kinda like the guys that put in for a border unit 4th or 5th choice just to get a tag not knowing anything about the unit and then too scared to hunt the border so it goes unused.

What on earth would make any critter lap up some motor oil? We had a dog eat a full coffee can of bacon grease once.

Ironically we had the same thing happen 2 days ago. Our grapes went bonkers this year and my wife was sitting on the sofa stripping them off the stems and 2-3 hit the floor. Danged dog was on them in no time. No luck getting her to throw them up. No way we’re running into town at 8 to ER when I’m up at 3 so we watched her and the next day she was feeling puny for sure but she’s good now. I too had no idea until my wife about had a meltdown about the dog sucking down those grapes!

Been pretty quiet around our place in So Az the last week except for a lightning bolt that hit about 50’ off the house and took out our router, garage freezer and arc fault breaker for our master wouldn’t stay put so had to wire tandem with another circuit until I replaced it. All that for about 10 drops!!