Scouting trip

With deer season on it's way(well, 2.5 months away, but it's gonna go fast) I figured it was time and then some to head out and do some scouting.  I was lucky enough to get drawn for a doe tag, but it was for an area I wasn't very familiar with...it just looked good on the map.

Today's goal was getting out and taking a 3D look at things, as well as identifying what land was public, and what land was private.  The bad news was, not much land was public...the good news was that there was a large amount of the private land either posted 'Feel Free to Hunt' or 'Hunt with Written Permission', so I have good leads on about 7 or 8 different hunting spots, and that's only looking over 1/3rd of the GMU. 

Since I didn't want to spend the day driving around on my own, I pitched it to my wife as nice day driving through Dayton(one of our favorite towns) to the scenic destination of Pomeroy, nestled between the Palouse and Blue Mountains.  There would be antique shopping, pioneer museums, and a picnic lunch! 

It wasn't much of a lie...Pomeroy is a cute little town, and there are antique stores, and a pioneer museum, and we had a picnic lunch. 

We even did those things before I drug her and the girls around on dirt roads.  And there were a lot of dirt roads.  Pomeroy is located in Garfield County, which is the most lightly populated county in Washington State...less than 2500 people in area two-thirds of the size of Rhode Island.  They have a nice looking court house though.

Things are pretty spread out, which means a lot of nice looking deer country...for white tails, which is a different type of hunting than I used to do for mulies.

There are deer out there somewhere...we saw two does while driving around in broad daylight...and both of them on land open to hunting.  The first would have been an easy black-powder shot...the 2nd one would have been pushing it...with open sights I'm limited to about 100 yards on a deer.  This one was really closer to 150...