Mule Deer Camp 2025

Passing up legal deer is not something I am accustomed too. The few times I’ve held back on pressing the trigger were generally more about safe or ethical shoots than holding out for something bigger. Second camp, first day in, fifth day total of mule deer hunting and there I was caught in a dilemma. Finish my season early or pass and keep hunting?

Busted by one of the many mule deer does that were cruising through.

“What makes this hunt cool is that we grew up with crappy deer hunting”, Clay Newcomb says this to Steve Rinella when they’re talking about a whitetail hunt they are on in Texas. Growing up in Ontario, the land I had access to had some tough whitetail hunting, hunting in the Coast Mountains can be just as rough. The blacktail deer that call the coast home are secretive and like the steep, thick terrain and tend to be migratory. There have been some seasons where just seeing a couple does made it successful. Then in the year of 2025 I finally go mule deer hunting.

Mid-day coffee brew up at camp.

Over three camping trips and ten days I saw around forty mule deer, along with an ermine, some grouse and wild horses. One night the coyotes stampeded the damn horses right through my campsite. This was the west I’d seen in hunting magazines, a place wide open, where you could park your ass and glass for miles. First night of my second trip I was up a mountain, in front of me were seven mulies, three of them bucks, medium, bigger medium and large. Large never gave me a great view of his antlers or a clear shot, the bigger medium buck was centred in the crosshairs several times, for over an hour I waffled on pressing the trigger. I couldn’t finish my mule deer hunt that early, choosing to eat my tag in the end, as a consolation prize I did bag a blue grouse that was twice the size of any ruffed grouse I had in the freezer and am fired up to return next fall.

See you on the water or the mountain.

-Matthew Mallory