Any South Dakota hunter?

I am looking a buy a piece of property in SD and was wanted to talk to someone who hunts there or lives there. Been looking at stats and it seems like the property is in a good area.

 

Where are you looking? Where do you live in CA?

 

I am looking in Pennington county near Wall SD. Seems to have pretty good stats. In CA I am in the East Bay about 45min east of San Fran.

 

What specifically do you want to hunt, or why are you looking here in S.D.?

 

I am going to buy a property within the next year. When I buy one I want to be able to kill Mule deer, Whitetail, and waterfowl. Montana is to expensive to buy big tracts of land. So from what I have been looking at it seems South Dakota and Nebraska are my best bet.

 

Well i don't know about Nebraska, so i'll leave that to someone else. 1 thing i do know is the stats can be deceiving.

From what i know the counties west of the missouri river (or west river as we refer to it) hold all the mule deer in the state. Some of the biggest mulies from what i've heard and seen come from Harding, Perkins and Meade county. Those 3 counties have also had BIG numbers of winter kill too, it just depends on how harsh the winter is. They also hold nice whitetails and some canada geese.

Now, the best whitetail hunting and waterfowl hunting in my opinion is east river, particularly the northeast corner of the state but holds NO mulies. To have all 3 on 1 tract of land with good success is gonna be pretty hard to find.

To have any 2 of the 3 on the same tract of land is very do-able.

Let me do more checking, i'll talk to some people and ask them the same question and see what they say.

Most of the hunting that i do is done east river but i have hunted in the west river counties that i mentioned above.

 

Thanks for the info. This is the stuff I need to hear.

 

So i asked a few guys that are experienced west river hunters this question, "if you wanted to buy a tract of land anywhere in the state that you wanted to hunt whitetail, mulies and waterfowl, which county would it be in?" They all agreed that 2 of 3 would be easy an almost any county. The thing that really limits you is gonna be the mule deer.

The general consensus was

1. Potter
2. Hughes
3. Campbell
Land closest to the river in those 3 would be best


4. Then the counties i talked in the previous thread

I asked them about Pennington and they said it would be a decent choice but it wont hold as high of numbers of big deer that the others do.

If you have any more questions just ask.