A couple weeks ago, bogged down with work, but with a southern Utah muzzleloader bug tag burning a hole in my pocket, I found myself in a quandary.

Should I drive the six and a half hour south an attempt a brief hunt in my old home

territory or should I save the time and gas money and put that towards scouting in

my new home country in southeastern Idaho.

I almost didn't go. I was indecisive to the last minute, under a lot of stress trying to meet article deadlines and

didn't have a podcast ready that's why that one was delayed a few days a couple

weeks back and building a home, holy moly, that's stressful. So I was dealing with all this stuff and I just was having a hard time shifting gears and getting into a driven hunt mode. But finally I piled a bunch of

gear into my truck and bombed south. My plan was to try and beat the dark to an old favorite vantage point, hopefully to glass

up a mature buck coming out to feed in a basin that I know intimately from a lifetime of

hunting it. Now Now this is a fairly interesting situation

because that area that I grew up in when I was a kid you could just buy a tag and

you could buy permits to hunt archery, muzzle odor, and rifle season.

You just got one deer, but you could basically keep hunting until you got your deer, right?

By now, pressure and 100 participation, so forth, is so high in Utah that even general

season tags have to be drawn for.

And it takes me a minimum three, usually four years to draw that tag.

Also, just this year, Utah changed some of their procedures

so that you can't turn a tag back in and get the preference points or bonus points back that you've built up over the years.

You can turn it back in, but generally you don't get your points back and if you turn it in too late you don't get your money back so

I kind of went into this knowing that I wouldn't hold that tag again for

several years and I really ought to take advantage of it.

I had mourning obligations that I just couldn't shake free of and so by the time I got my truck loaded

...