When in doubt, scout.

This saying has been applicable in more than one arena I’ve found myself in. I’ve even got a University of Arizona hat with this saying emnroidered on it, made famous by the late John Polumbo who was a professor in the Department of Entomology at the campus in Yuma. He taught each Pest Control Advisor this mantra, which in turn created a group of people well versed in pest management.

White water fanatics live by the phrase. I’ve been there, as captain of a boat a time or two. The last thing I want on my shoulders is to inadvertently baptize the unwilling when the best path to avoid such a travesty could have been viewed from above or the sideline beforehand.

Most hunters could learn a lot if they repeated  this simple sentence to themselves and followed through. No matter their experience level, when in doubt, scout. Success is offered to the few willing to put in the work.

My husband knows what’s coming when I draw a tag. Mind you, he has his own plans for hunt-prep, but when it’s my turn, he fills all the gas jugs and clears his calendar.

We have paper maps. There’s a bunch in a pile in the closet we don’t really look at anymore, but they’re riddled with notes, circles, even an x or two for a place we don’t ever need to waste our time with. Today we have OnX and Avenza with Flatline maps. And before anyone complains that those don’t always work, yes they do if you know how to use them.

One thing that I really appreciate about Jason is that he rarely interjects his own opinion on how or where I should hunt. I’ll read forums ahead, and even the game and fish pages on where to hunt for a species depending on the season and then I’ll make a plan where we should scout. And the reason we fill the gas jugs, is that each day scouting I will without fail, conjure a 50 plus mile track to investigate.

These roads have mostly been open. They’re not always in good shape. Even current forest maps sometimes don’t tell the whole truth and OnX is notorious for lagging an update to landowner changes and road closures. But I’ll make sure we check every water, tank, spring, crossing and fence along the way and mark up the maps with multi-colored symbols and forget to make a key. At the end of the day, the app looks like you let a toddler loose with the crayons.

And the gates. Those barb wire gates. It’s a love-hate relationship, but always leave them how you found them. The lazy deserve a flat tire.

You know those moments when your spouse audibly sighs before looking at you, sunglasses or not, and you already know the nature of their forthcoming inquiry? Now this may be one of my favorite parts about scouting before a hunt. Jason looks at me with a quiet apprehension in regards to whether or not my navigation skills have led us astray. 

To his defense, the path before us usually appears that no one had been down it since Cooke and his batallion in the mid 1800s. In my defense, three different maps in fact say yes it is a current and open road and there were no signs to indicate otherwise. So without hesitation, I implore him to proceed.

We always get where we need to go, and the back tracking has been limited to less than a handful of incidents. And we always see the neatest country or wildlife on these expeditions.

The dogs have never complained…

Other times, we just throw caution to the wind and hit the ground running opening day. I can’t say this has been poor planning either. We have been lucky. And I will take luck every time if it means I can attain it without being as good as I should be.

For example, roughly four and a half months into our relationship, we found ourselves immediately adjacent to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation meeting a man I had never met before, on a ranch I’d never been to before, to gain access to public land to hunt pronghorn. That night found us storing a pronghorn head in the motel mini-fridge. Then we left a note on the door of another hunter who we’d met that morning who had never hunted pronghorn,  and offered to assist him the following day. He too, left with a notched tag.

I’ll just say, that before we even got to these 50 mile loops, that Jason should have known the fun he was in for.

He may not agree with the word fun, but this is my story to embellish as I please.

This fall finds us headed to a place not unfamiliar,  but vast enough to be a challenge. The last time I hunted deer here we got lucky. We then saw bits of it on Jason’s sister’s bighorn sheep hunt in November, but deer country that was not. It has also been reaching temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit so scouting will wait until October. For now, online maps will be studied and conversations I am lucky to be able to have with others who have the tag will be put to good use.

I could bore you to tears with stories of Jason’s arduous journeys in the quest to fill my tags, but my point for every hunter, new or experienced, is to take the time to ensure you have the best chance at success. Now I cannot define what success means to you so take that with whatever grain of salt you’ve garnered.

We have at our fingertips, in the plams of our hot little hands, or on maps on the dining room table, the information needed to make each hunt a journey of epic proportions.

And when in doubt, scout.