During my hunting trip, I was able to take a few, well, actually quite a number of photographs of events during my trip. Here are a few I pulled from my camera today that I would like to share with you along with brief explanations of each.
Travis spent the week at hunting camp. On Sunday, the day everyone arrived, Travis brought along his young son Caiden to begin a part of the Maine hunting tradition. In this photo, Travis and Caiden are getting prepared for a short ride in the “mule”. Needless to say, Caiden loves to go for rides.
Gary Inman tests out Dennis’ new tree climber tree stand in the big white birch next to camp. They thought a practice run would be better than hoping for the best once into the woods. By the expression on Gary’s face, I think he liked it!
One new addition to my bag of gadgets this year was a portable ground blind from Ameristep. It opens in a snap but getting it folded back up like it came out of the package is another issue. After setting it up, I decided a snapshot of what I was seeing from inside the blind was in order. Although I saw no deer from this blind, one of our hunting companions fired at and missed a large buck only a few yards from this stand.
My 1 1/2 second opportunity at a trophy buck caught me off guard. Once the excitement was over, I returned to the scene of where it all started and within about 30 feet of where the monster was bedded down, I found this rubbing on the red pine sapling. Strangely, this sapling was the only evergreen tree I could see among what seemed an endless hillside of 1-3-inch beech whips. Nasty going, but it was on the sunny slope during a cool day and miserable hunting. Great hideout.
Having given up on the “big one that got away”, I headed down the mountainside toward camp. In the mud in front of me, I spotted this buck track. Impressed, I laid one of my .308 bullets down next to the track so viewers could see a big track. If you don’t think it is good sized, lay out your shell and make a comparison. I have seen them bigger but this one’s right up there.
Without giving away my “secret” hunting spot, this was a view from the top of one of the mountains we hunted during the week. This is a sunset and to the west are the White Mountains and the Presidential Range. In the years I have been going to hunting camp (32), sometimes we hunt the mountaintops and sometimes the low swamps or both. This year the deer seemed quite plentiful whereever we could find beechnuts. This mountaintop had a few. Gary bagged a 190 pound, 9-pointer on top of this mountain. That story later.
It was only a day or two past full moon. The looks of this picture might suggest I was doing some night hunting but that is not the case. In actuality I had about 10-minutes of legal shooting time left when I took this photo.
Tom Remington
