Mustangs Rule
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2021
- Messages
- 1,120
My last Hunting Ground will be Muzzle-Loader only.
By my best count, this coming hunting season will be my 60th. I am getting close to 80 years old and did miss several seasons during my busy middle years.
Playing more number games; I grew up on an eastern dairy farm with unlimited year-round Whitetail doe tags, spent 29 years living in desert mountains getting two buck tags per year, lived in Wyoming when residents got doe antelope tags dealt out like a hand of poker cards and lastly through most of my many decades out west, I could at least get a doe elk tag every other year.
And in all those couple hundred opportunities, I have only had three traditional muzzle-loaders hunts, so addicted have I been not just to center-fire rifles, but also so impatient that I could not resist the usually much earlier center fire rifle season.
As I say this, I must include the fact that, these three traditional ML hunts were the most enjoyable of my long hunter's life. They were late season, few other hunters were in the field, hunter success was so high, it was cool to cold weather which aided meat care, and the entire experience of more tracking and stalking offered a genuineness that was just so rewarding.
I left my range finder behind.
Last spring when applying for next year's tags, I took advantage of a new traditional muzzle loader private land “any Whitetail” program. I had no interest in hunting the giant hay lots, great 6.5 Creed country, but was instead interested in hunting private “Old Ag Land” where the forest had returned, and the land had gone back to wild.
I found several old ranches, where the beaver, ponds, small streams and wet 4-foot-tall original prairie grassland had returned, as did the aspen and cottonwood forests. The shrub/berry bushes land had come back too.
I asked a few such landowners I knew and easily got permission for a Traditional ML WT deer hunt during the first half of December. They liked the idea.
It is so cool to see this high prairie land going back to wild again. With cover and natural feed more and more elk are beginning to winter around there.
It is ideal habitat, and I have an ideal ML rifle. Ages ago I bought a basic, no shiny brass, walnut stocked 50. caliber TC New Englander. I sent it back to TC to have vintage aperture sights installed and the trigger tuned by TC professionals. It will shoot one minute of a small tangerine at 125 yards with heavy TC Maxi balls.
I put sling swivels on it, a Whelen Sling and have my handmade 48-inch triple oak Shooting Sticks. Otherwise, a Mountain Man at the Green River Rendezvous of the 1840’s would think it normal.
I like the smooth single trigger with the generous trigger guard big enough for gloves. I so dislike double triggers.
Of course, I have two carbon steel Green River knives with my homemade elk handles and harness leather sheaths I made and sewed with fine copper wire.
By my best count, this coming hunting season will be my 60th. I am getting close to 80 years old and did miss several seasons during my busy middle years.
Playing more number games; I grew up on an eastern dairy farm with unlimited year-round Whitetail doe tags, spent 29 years living in desert mountains getting two buck tags per year, lived in Wyoming when residents got doe antelope tags dealt out like a hand of poker cards and lastly through most of my many decades out west, I could at least get a doe elk tag every other year.
And in all those couple hundred opportunities, I have only had three traditional muzzle-loaders hunts, so addicted have I been not just to center-fire rifles, but also so impatient that I could not resist the usually much earlier center fire rifle season.
As I say this, I must include the fact that, these three traditional ML hunts were the most enjoyable of my long hunter's life. They were late season, few other hunters were in the field, hunter success was so high, it was cool to cold weather which aided meat care, and the entire experience of more tracking and stalking offered a genuineness that was just so rewarding.
I left my range finder behind.
Last spring when applying for next year's tags, I took advantage of a new traditional muzzle loader private land “any Whitetail” program. I had no interest in hunting the giant hay lots, great 6.5 Creed country, but was instead interested in hunting private “Old Ag Land” where the forest had returned, and the land had gone back to wild.
I found several old ranches, where the beaver, ponds, small streams and wet 4-foot-tall original prairie grassland had returned, as did the aspen and cottonwood forests. The shrub/berry bushes land had come back too.
I asked a few such landowners I knew and easily got permission for a Traditional ML WT deer hunt during the first half of December. They liked the idea.
It is so cool to see this high prairie land going back to wild again. With cover and natural feed more and more elk are beginning to winter around there.
It is ideal habitat, and I have an ideal ML rifle. Ages ago I bought a basic, no shiny brass, walnut stocked 50. caliber TC New Englander. I sent it back to TC to have vintage aperture sights installed and the trigger tuned by TC professionals. It will shoot one minute of a small tangerine at 125 yards with heavy TC Maxi balls.
I put sling swivels on it, a Whelen Sling and have my handmade 48-inch triple oak Shooting Sticks. Otherwise, a Mountain Man at the Green River Rendezvous of the 1840’s would think it normal.
I like the smooth single trigger with the generous trigger guard big enough for gloves. I so dislike double triggers.
Of course, I have two carbon steel Green River knives with my homemade elk handles and harness leather sheaths I made and sewed with fine copper wire.
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