The 2009 Deer Season Report

The middle rifle season for Arizona opened on Friday of last week. Todd and I went out over the weekend in unit 34A, Whetstone Mountains, where we were drawn for antlered whitetail. Whitetail or Coues Deer are found at elevations exceeding 5000 feet, and our whitetails are not as large as their midwestern cousins. Plenty of permits are issued for whitetails, but hunter success is at best 23% and that figure was for unit 34B, which we hunted two years ago.

We did all of our hunting in French Joe Canyon, which is off Arizona state highway number 90, about ten miles south of I-10. That was not the canyon that I scoped out earlier this year but I do know that whitetails like canyons as that I've seen plenty of them in Ramsey Canyon which is near Sierra Vista.

On this hunt, we didn't see any deer at all. No other wildlife save for some hawks and crows. We found areas where it was obvious that the deer had bedded down recently. We found some of their scat, and we noted that some mesquite trees had some of their lower branches stripped of leaves, which told us that deer had been feeding there. But as I said, we didn't see any deer on this trip.

We called it quits Sunday at sundown. The season doesn't close until sundown on Thursday, but Todd was not available this week, and as circumstances would have it, the clutch in my truck went out this morning and it's in the shop right now as I type this.

Good luck? I'm going to say that it was.....it would not have done us any good had I lost the clutch some thirty miles from civilization, where the roads are primitive and four wheel drive is a necessity.

I think though that next year we'll apply for mule deer tags, and return to 34B. I've been told by a co-worker that the muleys are plentiful down Green Valley way.

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Word from Iowa is that my uncle Tony is not doing very well as of late, and is a candidate for some open heart surgery. He's 87 years old and as such the decision will not be made until this coming Friday. My aunt Marge is understandably very concerned about this. I've been out to Iowa before to see them. They lived most of their lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and moved out near Iowa City some five years ago to be near where two of their sons (cousins Kirk and Todd......this is a different cousin Todd than the one I go hunting with and who lives near Phoenix).

Tony served our nation during the Second World War, and the B26 he was on was shot down over Yugoslavia behind enemy lines during the war. Those who survived the crash were aided by the resistance and they were in hiding for about six weeks. Some years after the war, he met and married my aunt Marge, and they lived in Lincoln where he had a job with the Nebraska Highway Department.

Marge and Tony have been damn good Americans all of their lives, and their children have gone on to become exemplary citizens as well.

I'll be keeping them in my thoughts and prayers.

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With my truck in the shop, I took today off from work and I'll be taking tomorrow off as well. This gives me a chance to catch up on some miscellaneous projects around the house, including this evening's blog entry. I'm somewhat torqued over this clutch job. I seem to be going thru clutches a little bit more often than I should.

However, the truck has over 315,000 miles on it. I haven't had to make a vehicle payment in over nine years. But one question that will come up is, should I think about getting a new truck?

I'll make that decision sometime in the middle of next year. I used to think that my "day of reckoning" on it would come at 160K miles........then I pushed it off to 200K......then 250K. I decided to go for 300K miles, and I'm past that now.

I may have my day of reckoning at 350K. It's been an extremely reliable truck since I bought it in November of 1995. It's a 1995 Toyota Tacoma in four wheel drive.

Now you know one reason why General Motors has lost market share.