Ep. 869: Foundations - How to Embrace the Early Stages of Planning a Whitetail Trip

Published Jan 14, 2025, 10:00 AM

This week, Tony talks about why giving yourself plenty of time to plan a whitetail road trip can not only make your life a little better, but also help you be more successful in the field come fall.

Connect with Tony Peterson and MeatEater

Tony Peterson on Instagram and Facebook

MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips

MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube

Shop MeatEater Merch

Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.

Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the early stages of planning a white tail road trip and just how beneficial it is to give yourself some time for the process. It might seem a little bit crazy since it's January, but this is actually a good month to start thinking about your deer plans. Now. I've personally come to the realization that when it comes to white tails, I'm just wired to be a pioneer and not much of a settler, and I really want to hunt a new state this year. That process, you know, just planning it out, it's fun to me, and it gives me something to think about in research and study and honestly kind of just daydream about. It's not all academic. Sometimes it's just fun. There is a process to it and that process is important. It's also what I'm going to talk about right now. A couple of weeks ago, I was laying on the floor praying for a merciful death. The previous day, I had woken up at three am in a little hotel room in western Minnesota with what I would describe as a not very good feeling in my body. Now, I know that Alien franchise is fictional, or at least I sure hope it is. But if you ever take the time to watch the original movie, where Sigourney Weaver and a bunch of space miners find an abandoned ship on a random planet that is full of creatures best left in deep space, you probably at least know about the chest burster scene. Now, it's pretty tame by today's standards, as my daughter's pointed out when we watched it recently, but at the time it was so gory that it really shocked moviegoers. The way that little baby alien took a creative route out of the guy's body before running off to grow very quickly and not get any friendlier was about what I was experiencing a few hours before the last day of Pheasant season was about to kick off, Except the aliens in my body had a pretty good idea which routes they were going to take to freedom, and neither was a whole lot of fun for me. Now, I highly doubt I need to go into any more detail here. Let me tell you I've had some long drives home from haunts, but that two hundred miles was an exercise in pure torture. And when I did get home, it didn't get any better. And while I'm not good at a lot of things, laying around doing nothing is definitely not my strong suit. So I spent some time doing what I was going to do anyway, which is pick a few states with deer in them and that might sell me a license, and it might have some public land where a guy could camp and hunt for a week or so. And I dove in, and you know what, it was a pretty nice distraction from what I had going on, which for about forty eight hours made me question whether it would be a good idea to hit the old eject button on life and just end my suffering. But I didn't, obviously, and in addition to feeling pretty dang good again, I also have the loosest of plans laid out for a fall white tail hunt this year. Now, before I get into that process, I want to talk about something that is a huge, often overlooked benefit to traveling to hunt. You see, we have a way of distilling the whole thing down to the likelihood of killing a big buck, and that's the focal point of trip planning. Something like, well, if I draw Iowa, I can go down there and shoot one of their many, many dumb and uneducated booners that just can't help, but Chase does all day long. That kind of thing. It's sort of like deciding you're going to run a marathon for the first time and spending most of your time figuring out exactly what where you will hang your finisher's medal. There's a whole lot that has to happen in between the decision and the finality of a long term, difficult goal. But then, like prepping your body for a twenty six point two mile run, planning a hunt is fun, or it should be. It's like a ticket to daydream for about eleven months or so, and it's the kind of thing that opens the door to a little more shooting throughout the summer, a little more gear prep and planning and just some good old fashioned scouting and logistics planning. The more time you have to plan, the more of that stuff you get to do, and the better off you'll be for it. It's fun to be prepared, and being prepared for an over the road hunt is really kind of the best way to actually achieve that goal of shooting that Hawkeye State booner when he comes grunting in now. Just as a side note here, this also applies to hunting somewhere different in your home state as well, which is something I think a lot of us could benefit from, if for no other reason than to get us out of our comfort zone and in a fresh territory. Now, your process will look different from mine, and that's okay, because there are things we can still share. But for starters, I always plan to go solo now. I love heading out on my own to be responsible only for myself. It's just such a relaxing, relieving feeling of not having to think about anyone for a few days. And I know most people won't do that, and I get why, but I also often don't actually end up going solo. I have some buddies who are almost always willing to travel if they can carve out the time, and it's great. But when I plan a trip, I plan it for myself first. I don't want someone else's schedule or life to get in the way before the whole thing even has any legs to stand on. When the locations and dates are kind of loosely in place and there are some waypoints dropped, and you know you can get a license, that it's a good time to loop in your buddies if that's your thing. Before that, there can just be a little bit too much static in the process, and it's easy to lose the thread. So to start it off, figure out your goal, and when you do, please think beyond just the size of the buck that you want to kill. You're planning a hunting trip, literally, a modern day adventure, and not a trip to a high fence ranch to order up a certain sized deer because you have a little room left on the wall of your vacation house for one more amount. Is there an environment that speaks to you or just seems cool as hell and you want to spend some time in it. Maybe it's something totally foreign, like endless sections of big woods or grassland, or maybe you want a carbon copy of this stuff you really love to hunt, like the bluffs along a big river that look exactly the same as the bluffs along that same river, but just on the other side in a different state. Of course, you can't think about this stuff without thinking about what states offer the habitat that gets you going, and then you have to imagine which of those states will actually sell you a license. This year, I'm looking at a few different states. I haven't decided on one yet. Missouri is one of them. I love Missouri, although I've only ever turkey hunted there and have only just scouted it for deer. For some reason, even though I can get to the top third of the state in about seven hours, I just haven't hunted deer there yet. I'm looking at Kansas too, if I can draw tag. Technically, I have hunted there once, but it wasn't the kind of hunt I'm looking for out of this, so I'm going to ignore that previous work trip down there and treat this as a fresh state for me now. The reason I'm looking at Kansas mostly is that I don't want to do a rut hunt down there. I think I can find some deer to hunt during October when I suspect the pressure on public will be very low. I like the idea of heading down there with a whole bunch of pins dropped on anything that might contain a little water, and then hunting when it's hot and everyone else is just waiting on November to suit up and head out. I'm also looking that Kentucky and Tennessee. I think both states are just beautiful, and I've never hunted either one. I did fish a tournament down in Kentucky a long time ago, and I did notice that we were around a hell of a lot of public land, and I also noticed that the public land kind of looked like the ground I like to hunt Minnesota, and it kind of looked like it was covered in big oak trees. And well, it's bothered me for a long time that I just never made the drive down there to chase a few deer. I threw Tennessee into the equation too, mostly because it's by Kentucky and it's always nice to just try to figure out if there's a compelling reason to just call an audible and hit up something that's a big question mark. I also just want to start heading down south to hunt more because I think there's a lot to learn from the big woods dwellers who don't have to worry about surviving winners. All of those options me within about I don't know, half a day's drive of my house, which is about as far as I want to ever drive anywhere anymore. They all also have at least some level of over the countertags or some areas I might be able to draw without having to buy preference points for too many years. As I mentioned with my potential Kansas timing if I could get a tag there, all of those states offer me something else, an opportunity to hunt when I want to without missing some part of the season at home that I'd really hate to miss. For you, that might be opening week, it might be the rut, it might be the youth rifle season. For me, the thing that I just will not miss is the time when my daughters can hunt here in Minnesota or across the river in Wisconsin. Their schedules are just stupid, busy and short of getting a divorce and somehow winning full custody, which let's be honest here, no judge in his or her right mind would grant me over my wife. I'm stuck working with whatever or time they can get away with for a few days. I don't really care if I miss the opener or the rut or whatever. For myself, I just don't want to squander the time I can get with the girls. Your mileage will vary depending on the circumstances of your life, but that's a big part of the fun of planning this stuff. You can look at the times of the season when you just know you aren't keyed up to get out into the woods and try to plug one of those holes with a deer hunting adventure somewhere else, And it pays to think of it as an adventure. And I truly mean that. I often hear folks say, well, why would I go there for the same kind of buck that I can hunt here? And I always think, why wouldn't you? Why does it always have to be about the odds of killing something bigger? What if it's something a hell of a lot more challenging and it gets you out of the house and doing something different. Now, maybe you live off your trail cameras at the home farm and have a good plan to never go out until they show you know your target buck's daylighting. That's a great way to kill a deer, But it's one hundred and eighty degrees different from the kind of hunt you might find just across state lines, where you need to show up, read sign, hang and bang for a week and see what the deer gods will grant you for the opportunities. Sure, maybe you could kill a good buck with a hell of a lot less effort at home, and in the name of efficiency, that's better. But in the name of enjoying the hell out of this stuff and feeling a sense of accomplishment, that deer across the river, even if he's smaller, is going to stick with you in a more meaningful way. The reason I pushed this stuff is that I know what it has done for me as a hunter, and I can see what it does for my daughters already. It's kind of like why I talk about quitting drinking a lot or starting to work out a lot. I know it's not for everyone, but I can almost bet anyone who does either they're going to be really happy they did. And I look at traveling hunting just like that. And the earlier in the year you start to play anna hunt, the better it will be because you have the time to develop a really good plan, and the mental benefit from that is real, not to mention the tangible benefit when you do finally load up the truck and head out this fall. But before that you have the opportunity to settle on a state and then whittle it down to a part of a state, and then maybe down to some individual properties. And with most of the opportunities, your buy in is some time spent staring at your phone in the dead of winter. If you have to apply for a tag, that'll come usually in the spring, but there's even a few months before that's a real concern. The timing thing works on the financial front too. A lot of folks think spending seven hundred dollars to shoot a deer in Iowa, or not quite that much but still not nothing in another state is crazy. The more time you have to plan, the more time you have to save up for a trip. If you need to look I get it. Life is expensive as hell lately, But a non resident and deer tag can be had by skipping some nights out with the family throughout the first nine months of the year, and again, you're buying a ticket to an experience you're not paying for the same buck you could shoot at home. It's a different thing. What I'm saying with this is that the sooner you start thinking about it, the more likely you are to make it happen, because you can get in front of the usual roadblocks that keep most folks from going. Now, maybe seven hundred dollars at one time is too much for a tag, but how about twenty bucks a week until your piggy bank is full enough to buy it. As I get older, I just believe in the long game approach to stuff more and more. It takes a little discipline, but it's almost always worth it. And when it comes to taking an advantage of the dwindling opportunities in the hunting space, I think it's way way worth it. The process of planning a road trip for ten or eleven months down the road gives you the chance to think happy thoughts about it and look forward to it and feel like you're putting in the reps to make a successful hunt happen. But it also gives you time to get over the negative thoughts. You know. I mentioned the money aspect, which is a concern for almost everyone, but it goes deeper than that. If an impromptu out of state trip came up in your life, and say October, you might suddenly realize that you don't have the camping gear necessary to make it happen, or you don't really have a good mobile setup that you're comfortable hunting with, or you don't really have a clue how to show up and find a deer in a place and then kill him in a short amount of time. That second guessing in those self doubts save a lot of deer every year, and they're totally understandable, but they can also be silenced by the right level of planning, which just takes time. Hell on that note, the sooner you look at maybe doing something cool somewhere that isn't your home ground, you now have an excuse to actually go look at it in person. If that's at all feasible, maybe that will fall under, you know, the guise of a turkey hunting trip in April, or maybe it can just be a day trip in February to see if the waypoints you dropped actually landed where the bucks like to live. I can tell you that personally, one of my favorite things about planning and out of state hunt is trying to figure out a weekend to get to wherever and start to see it for myself and learn it. Almost every time I've done that, it has fueled my fire to see the trip through. Now once in a while I just don't find anything. But when you have enough time to pivot out of one plan and into another, that's not such a big deal to go walk a bunch of ground and just cross it off the list because it just doesn't do it for you. Now, that might seem like a failure, but it's not. That's how you get better at hunting, and it's a thousand times more beneficial than hunting a comfortable situation where you don't have to solve any big mysteries. Now, if you do loosely plan a trip somewhere and a little scouting weekend shows you the good stuff, you'll have the mental benefit of months of optimism that will saturate your dear brain. That's also crazy beneficial. The upsides to something like this are so many, and the downsize can be mitigated pretty heavily toward the minimal. Also, and I can't stress this enough, it's just fun.

Now.

It's not for everyone, but it is probably for more of us than we'd like to believe I'm going to dive into it as a hell of a lot deeper throughout the next few months as I go through the process as well. But for now, maybe just kick it around. Maybe you're an over the road hunter just waiting to happen, and maybe you should come back next week because I'm going to talk about how your mind is often not your friend when it comes to deer hunting. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I just want to say thank you. I say it every week, and I mean it every week. You guys are awesome. Your support is amazing. We wouldn't be here without you, and we truly appreciate showing up every week and for reading the articles and watching the films and just kind of going along with us on our adventures and sharing your stuff with us as well. So thank you for that. Now, if you want to get some more white tail content or you just bored out of your mind because it's the debt of Winner, the mediater dot com has so much entertaining stuff there. You know, you can find recipes and articles whatever, and you can make yourself a better hunter, or you can just check out some of the films that we drop just for a little bit of entertainment and watch people you know doing stuff throughout the fall, throughout the year. Really, that just fun to watch. And of course we got a whole bunch of podcasts worth listening to there as well, so go check them out at the mediater dot com.

Wired To Hunt Podcast

Dive deep into the world of whitetails with leading expert Mark Kenyon. Each episode covers specific 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 880 clip(s)