San Carlos Coues Deer Hunt

[apache7mm]

Here's a few pictures from this past weekends coues deer hunt on the San Carlos, myself,cousin, and a couple of first-timers hunted saturday morning and saw about 15 coues altogether with only one buck, he was a nice 3-point but we were holding out for a few trophy bucks we had spotted here back during the elk antler harvest, we ended up packing out antlers instead of coues deer.....in all we walked a good 8 miles in some of the roughest country around the southwest, but anyone who hunts coues deer knows that it comes with the territory, these little guys are not to be taken lightly.

Here's a shot of where we hunted, elevation about 4000ft on the floor and up to 6000ft on top.

Another good shot of prime whitetail habitat.

This was the first piece of antler we picked up, a nice 4-point mulie skull.

Here's the anlters we found, 1 5x5 elk skull, a set of very nice 3x2 whitetail sheds, 4x4 mule deer skull, and a set of 5x5 elk antlers.

A close up shot of the elk skull, he was a very nice up and coming bull, G1-G3 measurements were already all past 16", unfortunately on the reservation no one is allowed to remove anlters that are still attached to a skull until a full investigation has taken place by the Game & Fish dept., only if the cause of death is determained to be natural may the finder keep the antlers.

Here's our $money shot!$

Just coming out of the cat claws and making it down the final stretch to get some lunch at the truck.

First-timers beware! this could be you!

Nothing like a good hunt and a long hot drive back to the old pueblo.

 

[antlerboy]

Nice antler finds Dan. If I was finding antlers like that I might have to put the Coues hunting on hold for a day or so. Killer set of Coues sheds, hang on to them bad boys and hopefully show them to me one of these days. I see why you only saw that many deer that day, you're all wearing white and not camo. I bet they saw you coming from 3 miles away in that open country.
Thanks for posting the pics,

Josh Epperson

 

[apache7mm]

hey josh, yea we had a good day that saturday, only bad thing was all day it was way too windy to hunt so we pretty much were only out to have a good time, we found a lot more antlers and seen even more when we were glassing but we didn't have the proper shed antler packing equipment(apaches carry out their deer whole on their backs not on packs! haha) plus it was the first weekend and we were looking for them big boys me and robert seen earlier this year and we also had two first timers with us too so i was more worried about them making it all the way around then the actual hunt itself, but yea that coues set it pretty nice, about 4" bases and a pretty decent spread on it, i'll hang on to them for sure and hopefully get a better picture to show you so keep your eyes posted on this forum in the next weeks, we'll be headed back up again this weekend and i'll have another story with photos again for sure, see you around josh.

dan