I'm a transplanted BC'r who has been living in Northern Alberta for some time now. Like most who came to Alberta from another province, I brought my family here looking for a better life and I must say that Alberta has been very good to us.

Along with my family I also brought a passion for hunting; specifically deer. My father was always big into hunting Blacktails so I was fortunate as a kid to spend many a day following him around while still-hunting for the Grey Ghosts in the timber on Vancouver Island. I was able to turn the skills that he taught me into a pretty good Blacktail hunting career, filling the freezer each year and being able to harvest some pretty nice animals in the process.

So far I've done fairly well at adapting my Blacktail hunting tecniques to Whitetails, and in the last 4 years I've harvested some nice Whitetail Bucks in the Fort McMurray region. While I have ran into a few Mule Deer in the area, I have not been able to turn those opportunities into any kind of success so far. With the limited numbers in the area it also makes it hard to target them.

So, this year I decided that if the goal was going to be to shoot a decent Mule Deer then I would have to travel to an area where there was a real possibility of getting one. Not knowing the province particularly well, I spent a lot of time on here researching the topic and whenever I met up with someone from the Southern part of the province I never missed an opportunity to pick their brain. A co-worker of mine put me onto an area in the South-Eastern corner of the province. He had hunted the area with his father in the past, and had always had success in finding some deer. With that limited info, I decided that 118 would be the area that I used my priority points on this year in hopes of getting a draw.

When the draw results came out I was very excited to learn that I had been awarded an Altlered Mule Deer licence. Now the planning started and it was time to get serious about not only making the hunt happen, but trying to set myself up so that I would have an idea on where to go when I got there. Being that I work a mon-fri job and live 1000 Kms away, actually going to the area to scout and gain access to land in person was not going to be possible or economically feesable. I was fortunate to have a couple members on here and on HuntingBC reach out to me in the way of PM's offering advice on areas to hunt so that I would have a starting point. With that, I got a landowners map and started making cold-calls. I soon learned that getting permission to hunt a specific track of land would not be the hard part; actually getting someone to answer the phone would be. I called every landowner I could find contact information for and in the end I did not manage to get in contact with anyone. Although not the way I like to do things, I decided that I would just travel down a few days early and start knocking on doors. I figured that since I was hunting solo and traveling such a distance someone would probably show pity on me and give me access to hunt their land on foot.

With that, I set out on October 31st for the November 2nd start of rifle season.