DEER CAMP
From
boy to a Grandpa
When I was a boy we did not do “Deer Camp.” The reason for
that was because the town where I was raised (Hiawatha, Utah) was a deer camp
in itself. We could step out the back door of our home and in about 20 or 30
steps we would be right in the middle of some of the best deer hunting in the
state. In fact the deer fed off of our gardens and apricot trees at various
times of the year.
Of course the preparation and getting ready for the big hunt
took as much effort and preparation as the hunt itself.
We usually knew where we were going to hunt long before the
time came for “deer camp.” It really did not matter where you were going, as far
as preparations to go went. The getting ready seemed to be the same whether the
destination was to be Joe’s Valley, The Gentry, Huntington Canyon or
occasionally some other spot. Joe’s Valley was always my favorite with The
Gentry coming in a close second.
Getting ready for the hunt was not something that happened
all at once. It usually got started in earnest in September when the people in Hiawatha started wearing their red (later hunter orange)
sweat shirts and hats. It was also then that I started cleaning my trusty .270
Winchester and to sharpen my hunting knife and round up a few essentials and
put them in a powder box to transport them to “deer camp” and to store them in
when we got there.
But I digress---- The first “deer camp” I really remember, when
we actually went and camped overnight was when I was about 14 years old. We
went to Joe’s Valley for that hunt. Joe’s Valley is in the mountains of Emery
County just above the town of Orangeville.
We left Hiawatha in my Uncle Spencer Day’s car and went to
Upper Joe’s Valley. We left Hiawatha about 4:00 AM so we could get to the camp
site while the roads were still frozen. This was a trick of my Uncle Spencer’s
and I would never have thought of it. If you time it to arrive at the camp site
while the roads are still frozen and then leave to come home while they are
frozen it does away with a lot of the problems with mud, which is one of the
major problems on some deer hunts.
When we arrived at the camp site we set up our tent, dining
fly, Coleman stove, lanterns and food and utensil tables when we first arrived.
As soon as we were settled into camp we gathered and chopped firewood and then
just sit around the fire waiting for bedtime so we could get a good night’s
sleep and then an early start on the opening day of the big hunt.
As I said this was the first real “deer camp” that I
remember.As a youngster (still a kid really) I did not know a lot
about camping. As long as we had a tent, a stove, warm clothes and food we were
content. Of course the sitting around the fire and telling tales was always a
big part of “deer camp.”
It seems as I got older “deer camp” required a lot more
preparation and then when the wife and family started going it required even
more but having the family along was a lot more enjoyable also.
One thing you could count on almost every year was that
while in “deer camp” at one time or another you were going to encounter MUD and
sometimes dealing with it was not very enjoyable. Now I am not talking about
regular mud, I mean mountain clay mud. It was the kind of mud that if you
stopped your car or truck on any kind of a grade, even the smallest you could
imagine, the mud was so slick that your vehicle would start sliding to the
lowest spot, which usually was in the ditch at the side of the road. If you
were pulling a utility trailer that could be bad news and of course if you were
pulling a trailer house that could turn into a nightmare.
I guess anyone who has ever hunted deer has heard of “buck
fever.” It even happened to me once and at that time I never imagined it could
happen to me. I also thought I would never “fess up” to it. However now that it
was more than 60 years ago I don’t mind telling the story. It was in 1947 and I
probably should not have been hunting because I was not yet quite “legal.”
The day started with Dad getting his old 30-30 and we hiked
up North Fork and the beginning of a beautiful fall morning in the mountains.
We had made it about half way up the canyon on the road that run up the bottom
of the canyon when we decided to hike up the side of the canyon to some cliffs
and sit in the sun and take in some “rays” to warm up a little. I was surprised
when Dad handed me the old 30-30 and told me it would be up to me to shoot a
deer if we saw one.
As we were sitting under the ledge and soaking up some heat
I kept thinking to myself that we would never see a deer just sitting in one
place in the sun. I told Dad I was going to hike up over the ledge and just
look around and that I would be back in a short while.
Just as I broke out on top of the ledge I jumped up two
bucks. I started yelling and shooting (I thought). It just took my Dad a few
minutes to get up the hill to where I was yelling. The first thing he said was,
“Why didn’t you shoot?”
I told him that I had shot but I run out of bullets. He
looked down at all the shells on the ground and none of them had been fired. I
had levered them all out of the old 30-30 but not fired a one. I vowed then
never to talk about my first and only case of “buck fever.”
Of course half of the fun at “deer camp” is to sit around the campfire and tell tall stories (not all true) about previous camps. You know the kind------The deer you got that was so big that four of you could not lift it off the ground---- The one you got that was not dead when you caught up to it and it got up and charged you---- And the group of hunters from California that you ran into. They were all drunk and had a semi-trailer refrigerated truck that they processed their deer in before they went back to California and then the most famous story of all---The California hunter that shot a farmers mule and as he was taking it through the checking station at the bottom of the canyon he asked the Fish & Game officer, “when did Utah start putting shoes on their deer?” Of course the longer you sit around the fire the bigger the TALES become.
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