Public Land Stand Etiquette Question

[Slm864]

I give left behind treestands in the whitetail woods the same treatment I give the unoccupied camping sites out west (the ones where the camper or wall tent is set up weeks or months before season with no one hunting from it). I go on as if it is not even there.

 

[tzone]

It doesn’t appear to bother others that my stand was in an area like that. Lol.

that’s public land hunting. But I do enjoy it.

 

[roravetz]

I give left behind treestands in the whitetail woods the same treatment I give the unoccupied camping sites out west (the ones where the camper or wall tent is set up weeks or months before season with no one hunting from it). I go on as if it is not even there.

Before I moved to Colorado, I was hunting not terribly far from Columbus Ohio on public and would see a lot of stands. I would see other hunters but never anyone using the stands. I never hunted in the tree stands but definitely hunted below them a few times. There just isn't enough land out there to not hunt a spot because someone left a stand. If someone tried to kick me out of that spot to hunt "their" stand I would have told them to go pound salt. It was tough to find good public land when I lived out there. In my mind having a tree stand in a spot gives that person about as much claim to it as the deuce I may or may not have taken right below it haha. But of course if someone was there before me I'd certainly keep moving on.

 

[WyoDoug]

The whole leaving tree stands on public lands is one of the most annoying things ever to me. I’d go as far to just consider it to be litter. You should be required to take your equipment with you when you leave or hunt from the ground.
People leave stands all over the place to “stake claim” to areas and most of the time fail to ever come back.
If an area looks promising I say set up and hunt it. I personally have never had a person return to hunt tree stands that were left behind therefore my hunt wasn’t affected.

This goes with the rule I have, "leave no sign that you were even there". My dad enforced that on me when I was very young. If we hung logs in trees to hang deer with, we had to take them down when we went home.