At the end of every hunting season, I like to do an “after-action report” to assess what went right and what went wrong. My report for the past season was that my drive, fitness, and hunting skills were at all-time highs, but my ability to make a controlled shot on an animal was disastrous. The dark depths of target panic set in, but I was still in denial; I wounded a bull elk with my bow and missed an ancient mule deer buck in the Nebraska sandhills. While I’ve harvested more than 40 ungulates with a bow and consider myself a proficient archer, I needed to put my ego aside to address this massive problem. Obsessive determination over many months yielded hours of visualization, and thousands of arrows shot, and my shooting was under control as September approached.

Although I had an archery elk, bear, and deer tag, my primary focus for the opening weekend was bucks. Colorado had record heat and severe drought that led to a lack of feed in usually lush, open country, so I knew it wouldn’t be long before the bucks headed into the timber to become ghosts and shed their velvet. Furthermore, the season started a week later than normal, which added a few degrees of difficulty. Over the course of the summer, I found a group of elk, including a nice 6×6 bull, and two bucks that would score over 180” which, if unpressured, seemed very killable. Mule deer are inherently unpredictable, but these bucks had a few tendencies that I honed in on during the last two weeks in August. Thus, my plan was to aggressively hunt bucks for the first five days of the season, and then transition into targeting bulls.