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.

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 Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about guided deer hunts and what you should think about if you're considering one. Only ten percent of hunters will ever go on a guided hunt. I've heard this number tossed around a lot, but I don't know if it's actually true. I don't doubt that it's in the ballpark. Though. Most hunters don't have any desire to do an outfitted hunt, and I don't blame them, but I'd also say that there are quite a few reasons to consider one, and that some folks would really enjoy them. I'm not really one of those folks, but I've done quite a few for my job, and I guess that makes me qualify to talk about them. So either way, I guess I'm going to so buckle up. A few weeks back, I walked to a familiar gate at the Minneapolis airport to sit with the other travelers and wait for the cattle call to board my Montana bound flight. Most of you probably know that met Eater's office is located in Bozeman, and about three or four times a year I have to head out there to teach Steve how to write or cal how to train a bird dog. During this last trip, the goal was to promote our Dog Days of May celebration, which meant I got to be a part of several met Eater podcasts, record a few houndations, episodes of my own in film, some hunting dog edu content. So, in other words, for like the twelfth time in a row, I flew to Montana and didn't do anything cool but work. Until last month, I'd never hunted or fished in the Big Sky state at all, and it kind of bothered me. But on this last trip, Corey Hawkins reached out to me and said, we're going fly fishing, come hell or high water now. While I give Mark a lot of shit for being a fly fisherman, I also loved to flyfish. In fact, I kind of look at fly fishing like I look at traditional archery. The acts themselves are great. It's just some of the people who wear either activity as their full identity that made me want to smash the eject button on life. After about two minutes of conversation with them, any Huski, I was pretty stoked to go float the Madison with Corey after a week of working, but the forecast didn't look great. Now. While everyone dreams of living in a state like Montana for the natural beauty, and I don't know like the thirty seven species of game you can hunt for, I've been out there in mid May and last year in late June and dealt with snow. Our weather for the week I was there was forties in rain, NonStop cold ass drizzle. I figured the trip was a no go. But Corey isn't that kind of guy. He's as capable of an outdoorsman as anyone I've ever met, and I've met a lot. And he said, even if we get soaked, the trout will still be eating and the boat will probably still float. So he and I, along with a Kansas trapper who was in town for a couple of podcasts of her own and who was also hell on Beaver's, bobcats and most fur bearers drove to a launch site on the Madison. When I climbed into the boat after parking Corey's truck, he handed me a rod and said, cast toward the bank, try to mend the line so there's a little drag and pay attention. I did my best, which was probably about one percent of what Corey could do with his eyes closed, and I started fishing. So did old trapper Kade at the front of the boat, and before long she hooked up on a rainbow, which made me jealous because I fully intended to kick her ass at fishing. We both got into the groove as Corey pointed out slicks behind rocks and runs and just about anything he could say in a nice way to help two not very good fly fisher people catch some fish. At one point, I got so hopelessly wrapped up with my line and my tippet that Corey took pity on me, and as former guides do, worked it out in a matter of seconds. When I was about in tears at all of the water I was drifting through that I couldn't fish because I'd created a total mess. Another time, I set the hook like a real man on a rock and left Corey's flies on the bottom of the river, and instead of handing me flies to retie, he simply took control of the situation and had me up and running in no time. I almost always fished with kids, so I understood that impulse deeply. It also felt really nice to be catered to and did not have to solve every single problem in the boat. Eventually, old Trapper Caate caught a whitefish, which put her up two to nothing, a score she pointed out multiple times without acknowledging that I had graciously given her the front of the boat. Then, as if God himself wanted me to not look like a total loser, I made a terrible cast that I tried to remedy as soon as my fly hit the water, which made it look like I had intentionally set the hook on the unluckiest brown in Montana. After that, I actually did everything right and caught a rainbow which evened up our score or before we hit our takeout spot, which was a real bummer because I could have fished that way for at least another couple of weeks. It was really nice to have someone else do the heavy lifting gear wise and experience wise, and to just be a passenger along for the ride. The guided deer hunts I've done have induced the same kind of feeling, but with a hell of a lot more pressure. Some folks want to offshore the work, some don't. Most of us will never pony up the dough to do a guide to deer hunt anyway, so we'll never know. I know that I never would have if someone else wasn't paying for it, which is exactly how I ended up on my first guide to deer hunt, where I found myself down in Illinois on some property that wasn't exactly known for producing only four keys, with three other magazine writers and eleven dudes from New York, some of whom were really decent guys, and some of whom were very quick to point out how many elephants they'd killed. I wish I was joking anyway. I had a great guide on that hunt who put me in and stands you couldn't pay me to get into. Now that I'm older and wiser and not quite ready to eat every meal through a straw. When I killed a barely pope and young level ten pointer, he gave me a hug and was truly happy. That's where the fun ended, though, and while the outfitter didn't say anything, I could tell they really would have preferred that buck to get another year or three under his belt. That was a good lesson on guided hunts, because I hate following someone else's rules on what I can shoot. When a great buck comes in and works a scrape at twenty yards, I don't want to think about whether I'll get fined if I shoot him. I did a hunt in Texas one time for the same TV show I filmed the Illinois Hunt for where the outfitter scared us all so much with the orientation meeting that the decks day, no one shot, despite several of us having good bucks in range. The meeting consisted of a quick lesson on how to tell if a buck was five and a half years old or older, but every one of us was from someplace very far away from where the mesquite grows thick. A text is dear to me is a novelty, and I am absolutely terrible at judging them because they are literally like half the size of the deer I'm used to And I wasn't alone in that issue either. So while I did get to see crazy running activity in more big bucks in one sit than I'll see at home in a season. It wasn't all that much fun. Constantly worrying about making a mistake that could cost you a lot of money and be embarrassing as hell makes hunting something different, especially because the main thought process for most of us is not to screw up to begin with. I guess since I'm focusing on the negative side of outfitted hunts, I'll keep going before I switch gears. A common horror story among folks who go on their first guided hunt is really shitty guides or over hunted stands, and a general lack of deer activity, which goes with the other two. Now, hunting skill varies a lot, but there's also the reality that some outfitters engage in a volume route to make money. Instead of say, like ten spots a season that all cost six thousand grand apiece, they'll open up forty spots that cost two grand. This is kind of like buying a new bird dog. There aren't any really good deals out there for outfitted deer hunts, just like there aren't too many good deals when you want to buy good blood in a dog if you're not paying very much for either, the odds of getting burned increase quite a bit. The free market has these things figured out pretty well. This brings me to the due diligence stage of guided hunts. If you want to do one or just intrigued by the prospect, the work you put into research operations is going to be worth it. References matter, call them. If an outfitter won't provide them, move on. That's a giant red flag. Also, don't get lost in the thought of a region or area being so good for deer huntrunning that you assume any outfitter there will be able to put you on big bucks. Deer hunting quality tends to boil down to individual property management. Ask potential outfitters lots of questions. Ask about how many people they run through in a season, whether they cater specifically to bow hunters if that's of interest, what their stands and blinds are like, and the hunting methods that are allowed. Ask about meals, lodging, travel, and everything that will be a big part of the hunt that doesn't involve you just shooting a good deer and then getting picked up by a guide on a side by side, and speaking of guides, ask plenty of questions about their experience levels. There is something wild that happens with a lot of outfitters where the guide turnover rate is really high. This makes sense if you ever get to do any guiding at all, because the job mostly sucks. Just as there are shitty outfitters, there are also shitty clients. It's not just on the guides and the outfitters here. Now, there are clients who don't want to work. They don't know how to hunt, but their egos won't allow them to realize that, and some people just can't be made happy. But there is truth about guides too. Hunting is an experience game, and the more of it you have, the more likely you are to be good at it. I know that's not exactly revolutionary, but the people who are most likely to take a guiding job and work their asses off on no sleep for the promise of decent tips and a job that at least revolves around hunting aren't exactly forty five or fifty year old dudes with thirty some deer seasons under their belts. Guiding is often a young man's game, and while a twenty five year old can be one hell of a guide if the stars aligned and they understand the properties well. It's a bit of a red flag when an outfitter talks about young new to the scene. Guides ask a lot of questions about this before booking, because it is important and remember to look past just the trophy photos and to ask who actually is in the photos, like are they paying clients or are most of them outfitters, friends and family? Do they look recent or does every picture kind of seem old? Ask about the hunting methods and what will be expected of you if you book a rut hunt. Are you going to be expected to sit all day from dark to dark? And if so, are you the kind of person who can do that? Maybe you want nothing more than to hunt from dark to dark because you're wired a little goofy and the protocol for a specific outfitter is to hunt until ten in the morning and not get back into stand until two. If that's the case, you might find yourself feeling cheated out of some really valuable standtime. That's a conversation you have to have long before you send in your deposit and block your PTO off on your work calendar. And when you're chatting with the outfitter, or you're showing up to the lodge for the start of your hunt. I'll say this, be careful about what you think you know. It's pretty easy for me to believe that I know more than most of the guides I've met, and on a general deer scale, that's probably true, I guess, but it's not true on specific properties and in places I've never been. That's a hard one for the ego to process. But one of the best reasons to do a guide of whitetail hunt isn't just to kill a big one while someone holds your hand. Is to learn about deer in a new setting and to experience hunting someone else's way. I've been in enough deer camps to see the way that this plays out, and I can tell you that you're genuinely way better off following the guide's advice. This is true for two reasons. One is, even if they are young and not overly experienced, they probably still have a pretty good idea what to do to get you on deer right where you're hunting. The second is that you won't get very far if you're butting heads with them all the time, at least you won't get anywhere good. Getting along with your guide will buy you freedom. It'll open up opportunities that you might not get if you constantly remind them how much better at this stuff you are than them. I learned this lesson when I got the crazy chance to go to South Africa a long time ago. It was a hunt I never thought would happen for me, and when it did, I shot horribly. I just fell apart, and on one of those shots I hit a big I paul A square in the joint where the shoulder meets the leg. African critters are notoriously tough. While I did a lot of damage to that in Paula, he didn't give up the ghost easily. I did get along very well with the outfitter and his son, unlike the absolute dipshit I went over there with. So when the time came to trail that in Paula, they told me I could go along and try to get in a follow up shot, which was way outside of their stated policy. It was one of the coolest experiences of my life to crawl along that blood trail, scanning the bush for that better at Impaula. In fact, I almost passed out from adrenaline when I finally shot him again, which is no joke. I wouldn't have gotten to do that if the outfitter didn't like me. I promise you that now. While it's common courtesy to just not be a prick, it's also a good way to get to do more stuff on a guided hunt and enjoy yourself a hell of a lot more. Be nice, and relinquish some of the control to the folks you're paying to help you on your quest. It's that simple, but it's sometimes not simple. It is worth it for the right person, or the person who draws a coveted tag like I talked about last week, and has decided that you know, it's time to reduce I was deer population by one. I also think that guided hunts are going to become more of a popular thing, as non resident hunting generally just gets run through the paper shredder over and over again, and we have more limited opportunities. While it may not be your jam at all, if you've ever considered it or thinking, you'll take some time in the future to treat yourself to a hunt in a state where the boomers are thick. Guided hunts are a real option, but you got to treat them like you would any kind of big business or investing decision. Got to do your research. Don't just trust what you're told by someone who's looking to make money off of you. Dig into the operation, talk to the people who've gone through it with them, and then figure out what you're really looking to get out of the hunt. If it's just to shoot a deer bigger than your personal best, the process for booking a hunt will be vastly different from looking to, you know, have the time of your life rattling in two dozen bucks just north of Mexico somewhere. There are a lot of options out there, and a few of them like that last example, might allow you to hunt some pigs or some other non deer animals that could flavor the whole trip in a much better way than just a single minded pursuit of a big buck. This is a good time of year to think about this kind of thing, because there's still plenty of time before November rolls around, and one thing you don't want to do is to impulsively book a guided hunt and then cross your fingers in fact, booking a hunt for this year is already a situation that can lead to trouble because the lead time isn't great and like finding that perfect German Shorthair pup or labrador puppy with just the perfect blood to suit your hunting needs, time is your friend when it comes to outfitted hunts, So give yourself enough of it to make the best decisions possible. Do that, and then come back next week because I'm going to talk about how deer hunting success doesn't just happen. You can't just wish for it. You have to understand what it takes to be successful and then put your mind to those things. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support. If you need some more hunting content, and you probably do, you know, whether that's an article, maybe you want to listen to a podcast, whatever, The Mediator dot com has you covered. We drop new content every day. We're dropping bird dog stuff. There's been some really cool trapping articles put up lately on the website. Tons of good stuff. Go check it out at the Mediator dot com

Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about guided deer hunts and what you should think about if you're considering one. Only ten percent of hunters will ever go on a guided hunt. I've heard this number tossed around a lot, but I don't know if it's actually true. I don't doubt that it's in the ballpark. Though. Most hunters don't have any desire to do an outfitted hunt, and I don't blame them, but I'd also say that there are quite a few reasons to consider one, and that some folks would really enjoy them. I'm not really one of those folks, but I've done quite a few for my job, and I guess that makes me qualify to talk about them. So either way, I guess I'm going to so buckle up. A few weeks back, I walked to a familiar gate at the Minneapolis airport to sit with the other travelers and wait for the cattle call to board my Montana bound flight. Most of you probably know that met Eater's office is located in Bozeman, and about three or four times a year I have to head out there to teach Steve how to write or cal how to train a bird dog. During this last trip, the goal was to promote our Dog Days of May celebration, which meant I got to be a part of several met Eater podcasts, record a few houndations, episodes of my own in film, some hunting dog edu content. So, in other words, for like the twelfth time in a row, I flew to Montana and didn't do anything cool but work. Until last month, I'd never hunted or fished in the Big Sky state at all, and it kind of bothered me. But on this last trip, Corey Hawkins reached out to me and said, we're going fly fishing, come hell or high water now. While I give Mark a lot of shit for being a fly fisherman, I also loved to flyfish. In fact, I kind of look at fly fishing like I look at traditional archery. The acts themselves are great. It's just some of the people who wear either activity as their full identity that made me want to smash the eject button on life. After about two minutes of conversation with them, any Huski, I was pretty stoked to go float the Madison with Corey after a week of working, but the forecast didn't look great. Now. While everyone dreams of living in a state like Montana for the natural beauty, and I don't know like the thirty seven species of game you can hunt for, I've been out there in mid May and last year in late June and dealt with snow. Our weather for the week I was there was forties in rain, NonStop cold ass drizzle. I figured the trip was a no go. But Corey isn't that kind of guy. He's as capable of an outdoorsman as anyone I've ever met, and I've met a lot. And he said, even if we get soaked, the trout will still be eating and the boat will probably still float. So he and I, along with a Kansas trapper who was in town for a couple of podcasts of her own and who was also hell on Beaver's, bobcats and most fur bearers drove to a launch site on the Madison. When I climbed into the boat after parking Corey's truck, he handed me a rod and said, cast toward the bank, try to mend the line so there's a little drag and pay attention. I did my best, which was probably about one percent of what Corey could do with his eyes closed, and I started fishing. So did old trapper Kade at the front of the boat, and before long she hooked up on a rainbow, which made me jealous because I fully intended to kick her ass at fishing. We both got into the groove as Corey pointed out slicks behind rocks and runs and just about anything he could say in a nice way to help two not very good fly fisher people catch some fish. At one point, I got so hopelessly wrapped up with my line and my tippet that Corey took pity on me, and as former guides do, worked it out in a matter of seconds. When I was about in tears at all of the water I was drifting through that I couldn't fish because I'd created a total mess. Another time, I set the hook like a real man on a rock and left Corey's flies on the bottom of the river, and instead of handing me flies to retie, he simply took control of the situation and had me up and running in no time. I almost always fished with kids, so I understood that impulse deeply. It also felt really nice to be catered to and did not have to solve every single problem in the boat. Eventually, old Trapper Caate caught a whitefish, which put her up two to nothing, a score she pointed out multiple times without acknowledging that I had graciously given her the front of the boat. Then, as if God himself wanted me to not look like a total loser, I made a terrible cast that I tried to remedy as soon as my fly hit the water, which made it look like I had intentionally set the hook on the unluckiest brown in Montana. After that, I actually did everything right and caught a rainbow which evened up our score or before we hit our takeout spot, which was a real bummer because I could have fished that way for at least another couple of weeks. It was really nice to have someone else do the heavy lifting gear wise and experience wise, and to just be a passenger along for the ride. The guided deer hunts I've done have induced the same kind of feeling, but with a hell of a lot more pressure. Some folks want to offshore the work, some don't. Most of us will never pony up the dough to do a guide to deer hunt anyway, so we'll never know. I know that I never would have if someone else wasn't paying for it, which is exactly how I ended up on my first guide to deer hunt, where I found myself down in Illinois on some property that wasn't exactly known for producing only four keys, with three other magazine writers and eleven dudes from New York, some of whom were really decent guys, and some of whom were very quick to point out how many elephants they'd killed. I wish I was joking anyway. I had a great guide on that hunt who put me in and stands you couldn't pay me to get into. Now that I'm older and wiser and not quite ready to eat every meal through a straw. When I killed a barely pope and young level ten pointer, he gave me a hug and was truly happy. That's where the fun ended, though, and while the outfitter didn't say anything, I could tell they really would have preferred that buck to get another year or three under his belt. That was a good lesson on guided hunts, because I hate following someone else's rules on what I can shoot. When a great buck comes in and works a scrape at twenty yards, I don't want to think about whether I'll get fined if I shoot him. I did a hunt in Texas one time for the same TV show I filmed the Illinois Hunt for where the outfitter scared us all so much with the orientation meeting that the decks day, no one shot, despite several of us having good bucks in range. The meeting consisted of a quick lesson on how to tell if a buck was five and a half years old or older, but every one of us was from someplace very far away from where the mesquite grows thick. A text is dear to me is a novelty, and I am absolutely terrible at judging them because they are literally like half the size of the deer I'm used to And I wasn't alone in that issue either. So while I did get to see crazy running activity in more big bucks in one sit than I'll see at home in a season. It wasn't all that much fun. Constantly worrying about making a mistake that could cost you a lot of money and be embarrassing as hell makes hunting something different, especially because the main thought process for most of us is not to screw up to begin with. I guess since I'm focusing on the negative side of outfitted hunts, I'll keep going before I switch gears. A common horror story among folks who go on their first guided hunt is really shitty guides or over hunted stands, and a general lack of deer activity, which goes with the other two. Now, hunting skill varies a lot, but there's also the reality that some outfitters engage in a volume route to make money. Instead of say, like ten spots a season that all cost six thousand grand apiece, they'll open up forty spots that cost two grand. This is kind of like buying a new bird dog. There aren't any really good deals out there for outfitted deer hunts, just like there aren't too many good deals when you want to buy good blood in a dog if you're not paying very much for either, the odds of getting burned increase quite a bit. The free market has these things figured out pretty well. This brings me to the due diligence stage of guided hunts. If you want to do one or just intrigued by the prospect, the work you put into research operations is going to be worth it. References matter, call them. If an outfitter won't provide them, move on. That's a giant red flag. Also, don't get lost in the thought of a region or area being so good for deer huntrunning that you assume any outfitter there will be able to put you on big bucks. Deer hunting quality tends to boil down to individual property management. Ask potential outfitters lots of questions. Ask about how many people they run through in a season, whether they cater specifically to bow hunters if that's of interest, what their stands and blinds are like, and the hunting methods that are allowed. Ask about meals, lodging, travel, and everything that will be a big part of the hunt that doesn't involve you just shooting a good deer and then getting picked up by a guide on a side by side, and speaking of guides, ask plenty of questions about their experience levels. There is something wild that happens with a lot of outfitters where the guide turnover rate is really high. This makes sense if you ever get to do any guiding at all, because the job mostly sucks. Just as there are shitty outfitters, there are also shitty clients. It's not just on the guides and the outfitters here. Now, there are clients who don't want to work. They don't know how to hunt, but their egos won't allow them to realize that, and some people just can't be made happy. But there is truth about guides too. Hunting is an experience game, and the more of it you have, the more likely you are to be good at it. I know that's not exactly revolutionary, but the people who are most likely to take a guiding job and work their asses off on no sleep for the promise of decent tips and a job that at least revolves around hunting aren't exactly forty five or fifty year old dudes with thirty some deer seasons under their belts. Guiding is often a young man's game, and while a twenty five year old can be one hell of a guide if the stars aligned and they understand the properties well. It's a bit of a red flag when an outfitter talks about young new to the scene. Guides ask a lot of questions about this before booking, because it is important and remember to look past just the trophy photos and to ask who actually is in the photos, like are they paying clients or are most of them outfitters, friends and family? Do they look recent or does every picture kind of seem old? Ask about the hunting methods and what will be expected of you if you book a rut hunt. Are you going to be expected to sit all day from dark to dark? And if so, are you the kind of person who can do that? Maybe you want nothing more than to hunt from dark to dark because you're wired a little goofy and the protocol for a specific outfitter is to hunt until ten in the morning and not get back into stand until two. If that's the case, you might find yourself feeling cheated out of some really valuable standtime. That's a conversation you have to have long before you send in your deposit and block your PTO off on your work calendar. And when you're chatting with the outfitter, or you're showing up to the lodge for the start of your hunt. I'll say this, be careful about what you think you know. It's pretty easy for me to believe that I know more than most of the guides I've met, and on a general deer scale, that's probably true, I guess, but it's not true on specific properties and in places I've never been. That's a hard one for the ego to process. But one of the best reasons to do a guide of whitetail hunt isn't just to kill a big one while someone holds your hand. Is to learn about deer in a new setting and to experience hunting someone else's way. I've been in enough deer camps to see the way that this plays out, and I can tell you that you're genuinely way better off following the guide's advice. This is true for two reasons. One is, even if they are young and not overly experienced, they probably still have a pretty good idea what to do to get you on deer right where you're hunting. The second is that you won't get very far if you're butting heads with them all the time, at least you won't get anywhere good. Getting along with your guide will buy you freedom. It'll open up opportunities that you might not get if you constantly remind them how much better at this stuff you are than them. I learned this lesson when I got the crazy chance to go to South Africa a long time ago. It was a hunt I never thought would happen for me, and when it did, I shot horribly. I just fell apart, and on one of those shots I hit a big I paul A square in the joint where the shoulder meets the leg. African critters are notoriously tough. While I did a lot of damage to that in Paula, he didn't give up the ghost easily. I did get along very well with the outfitter and his son, unlike the absolute dipshit I went over there with. So when the time came to trail that in Paula, they told me I could go along and try to get in a follow up shot, which was way outside of their stated policy. It was one of the coolest experiences of my life to crawl along that blood trail, scanning the bush for that better at Impaula. In fact, I almost passed out from adrenaline when I finally shot him again, which is no joke. I wouldn't have gotten to do that if the outfitter didn't like me. I promise you that now. While it's common courtesy to just not be a prick, it's also a good way to get to do more stuff on a guided hunt and enjoy yourself a hell of a lot more. Be nice, and relinquish some of the control to the folks you're paying to help you on your quest. It's that simple, but it's sometimes not simple. It is worth it for the right person, or the person who draws a coveted tag like I talked about last week, and has decided that you know, it's time to reduce I was deer population by one. I also think that guided hunts are going to become more of a popular thing, as non resident hunting generally just gets run through the paper shredder over and over again, and we have more limited opportunities. While it may not be your jam at all, if you've ever considered it or thinking, you'll take some time in the future to treat yourself to a hunt in a state where the boomers are thick. Guided hunts are a real option, but you got to treat them like you would any kind of big business or investing decision. Got to do your research. Don't just trust what you're told by someone who's looking to make money off of you. Dig into the operation, talk to the people who've gone through it with them, and then figure out what you're really looking to get out of the hunt. If it's just to shoot a deer bigger than your personal best, the process for booking a hunt will be vastly different from looking to, you know, have the time of your life rattling in two dozen bucks just north of Mexico somewhere. There are a lot of options out there, and a few of them like that last example, might allow you to hunt some pigs or some other non deer animals that could flavor the whole trip in a much better way than just a single minded pursuit of a big buck. This is a good time of year to think about this kind of thing, because there's still plenty of time before November rolls around, and one thing you don't want to do is to impulsively book a guided hunt and then cross your fingers in fact, booking a hunt for this year is already a situation that can lead to trouble because the lead time isn't great and like finding that perfect German Shorthair pup or labrador puppy with just the perfect blood to suit your hunting needs, time is your friend when it comes to outfitted hunts, So give yourself enough of it to make the best decisions possible. Do that, and then come back next week because I'm going to talk about how deer hunting success doesn't just happen. You can't just wish for it. You have to understand what it takes to be successful and then put your mind to those things. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support. If you need some more hunting content, and you probably do, you know, whether that's an article, maybe you want to listen to a podcast, whatever, The Mediator dot com has you covered. We drop new content every day. We're dropping bird dog stuff. There's been some really cool trapping articles put up lately on the website. Tons of good stuff. Go check it out at the Mediator dot com