It was the second weekend of October, 2003, and I had taken three days off from work to scout a section of Daniel Boone National Forest I had never set foot on before.

I had been hunting Whitetail for 19 years. Most of that time I hunted my late uncle's farm in the next county over,

340 acres of mixed hardwoods and pasture that had been in our family since the 1960s.

He passed away in February of 2022, and his widow sold the property to an out-of-state buyer

eight months later.

The new owner did not want hunters on the land.

Not me, not my brother, not the two cousins who had hunted that ground their entire lives.

He sent a certified letter, polite but final, and that was the end of 19 seasons.

So I spent the summer doing what every hunter without land does. I sat at the

kitchen table with a stack of topographical maps from the forest service and a magnifying glass,

and I looked for somewhere new. I marked 19 possible spots in three different ranger districts.

I drove out to 13 of them on weekends through July and

August, walking the roads and checking access. By the middle of September, I had narrowed the

list down to two, and the better of the two was a section along Rock Creek in McCreary County,

on the southeastern edge of the National Forest about 47 miles from my house.

Rock Creek had everything I wanted, a long ridge running northeast to southwest, with hardwoods

on the eastern slope and a creek bottom thick with greenbrier at the base, a saddle between

two knobs where deer would funnel through during the rut. An old logging road that came in from the

north and dead ended at a gated turnaround about two miles from where I planned to hunt. The closest paved

road was four miles away. The closest house was further than that. I had been out there once already,

on the 18th of September, just to walk the road in and check the

access.

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