I’ve always been a private land hunter with prepared stands but after having a treestand stolen in December (summit climber, not locked up) and another 4 stolen in the past week (2 summit climbers (2 lone wolf hang-ons and 2 summit climbers - this time I locked them up w/cables and good pad locks. You can see where they tried and failed to cut the cables and locks with bolt cutters then used what appears to be a battery powered angle grinder to cut the lock shackles). I don’t know how I can defend against an angle grinder other than by not leaving any stands in the woods. I’ve never found a good way to pack in a treestand and get it attached to the tree without a ton of noise. Anytime I’ve gone in to hang and hunt in the sit I end up spending half an hour getting the stand ready for transport and getting my hunting pack connected, but seems like it never fails that at some point during the hike in something shifts and now the two parts of the stand are clanking together with every step or my hunting pack has come loose and I’ve got buckles and zippers banging against the stand. Part of the issue is I hunt in thick woods so I am constantly ducking under and around briars and brush and everything just comes loose. That also presents another issue because despite my best effort it seems like the stand gets caught in single briar, vine, or branch I pass and if by some miracle it doesn’t then my third hand bow holder sticking out to the side surely will. Even if by some miracle I manage to get to the tree without spooking every deer in the woods, I still have to seperate both halves of the stand and get it attached to the tree and doing that there is almost guaranteed to make a ton of noise. Plus after that I often have to climb up twice - once to get partway up the tree only to discover that I set my cables too tight or too loose, then a second time after I’ve climbed down and adjusted the cables. I realize it’s gonna take an extra hour per hunt just to get everything packed up for transport and assembled for transport then unpacked and attached to the tree then repacked to leave and I’m okay with that. I just can’t figure out how to do it without making a **** ton of noise and ending up covered in blood from getting tangled up in briars during the walk in. The woods around here are too thick for still hunting with a bow so the only options I can see are to figure out how to hang and hunt, plan on spending a couple grand more on treestands that I know I will only get to use a couple times before they get stolen, or just call it quits for bow season and wait until November and still-hunt since by then the heavy brush will have thinned out enough to see what I’m shooting at and I can use a rifle to shoot through whatever brush is left without worrying about my arrow deflecting off a twig.
The smaller the stand, the easier it is to move thru the woods. Look for a stand that is narrower then your back. The key to noise is simple. You just cover everything that is metal with stealth strips. Then go as slow as possible when setting up. The more you do it, the quicker and quieter you get. Think of it this way. If you make noise, your hunt is over, so don't make noise. I tare down my set on every hunt no matter what. I do about 60 sits a year. Just takes time. It will be frustrating at first. Just got to embrace it and do it. My advice is get great sticks with double steps and no moving parts. 3-4 sticks and learn to use single step aiders. Other option to keep it lite is saddle hunting. But there is a learning curve and will require a large investment off the bat. Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
Thats a lot of money gone in an instant. Sorry to hear that. How many hunters are there!!! You might be able to do the smallest XOP or LW climber and that would be much more compact than the Summit. I'm not a big fan of carrying 4 steps and a hang on but, have done it before and killed a deer the same morning. Here is another option for you. Buy a climber and leave it in the woods but, bury it vs. leaving it on the tree. If the woods is thick, it might be an option. I do this today with success. I also lock it on tees where no one would really go to hunt which is much closer to the area I would like to post up. This avoids carrying it in for about 90% of the walk.
It sounds like the easiest (short term) option for you without having to go through some big learning curve is to buy another climber and pack it in and out. Learning how to cinch everything down super tight will keep it quiet. Like holt said stealth strips are good. Gear ties can help snug things up as well. Maybe carry a pair of pruning shears on your walk in to get the worst of the thick stuff . It may help a little bit. I know what you are talking about with the thick areas. I hunt an area that is loaded with shrubs, honeysuckle and briars. That was the main reason i switched to a saddle. My lonewolf, as compact and tight as i could pack it, would still get snagged on everything. The long term solution may be a saddle set up. I know they arent for everyone but I personally dont like hunting out of stands anymore. The advantages that come with the saddle outweigh the disadvantages imo. Hope you get lined out regardless. I HATE thieves!!! They are a cancer. But like AOC says, they are only stealing because they are hungry.
Ive done this as well with my climbing sticks. I would leave my platform in the tree and just hide my climbing sticks by covering them with leaves isually at the base of another tree maybe 20 yds away.
I’m the only hunter. It’s a golf course though so there are lots of people around. They rent the land from from an LLC that I control so there is a clause that allows me to hunt it. I actually don’t hunt on the actual course during bow season. For bow I mostly stick to the surrounding woods and target trails leading to/from the course. I think I probably screwed up by putting up some reflective tags leading to my bow stands so I could get to them easily in the dark. Im thinking maybe somebody hit a ball in the woods and found one stand, saw the tags and realized that provided basically a map to all the others. I’m 50/50 whether it was somebody stealing it for their own use or somebody who lives on the golf course and did it to “protect the deer”. There are several folks who live on the course that think of the deer as pets, feeding them and giving them all names and such I’ve already have a lone wolf hand climber stand but I hate the damn thing. The seat is so small and the cushion is so thin that it’s painful to sit in for more than an hour. Also the design of the foot platform lone wolf uses on their climbers makes it kind of useless around here. It’s kind of swampy lowland and a lot of our trees here have a ton of taper at the bottom of the trunk (ie at the bottom 5-7’ of the trunk it starts to widens a whole lot) Essentially in order for you to climb up higher than 10-15 feet you have to have the cables so tight that when the foot platform is 4’ above ground level (the highest I can put it and still be able to quietly climb up onto it) its angled up at like a 50-60 degree angle. That’s not a problem with a summit because the way they provide bracing for the 2 bars where the cables insert into is by using supports that go down at an 45 degree to the foot plat form. That kind of forms a triangular opening that clears the tree when you have it tilted up really steep. With the Lone wolf they just put a horizontal bar between the two pieces of upper tubing which means you can only get it angled upwards so far before that upper support bar wedges against the tree. Basically in order to get up above 10-15 feet with the lone wolf in most of the trees around here you need to put the bottom section of the stand like 7’ off the ground and use climbing sticks to get into it, which completely defeats the purpose of a climbing stand to begin with. I’m thinking the saddle plan might be best for me. I actually have a pretty good start on the saddle hunting thing due to working as an assistant for an arborist for a few summers in high school and college so getting into the tree is NBD. I’ve already got ascenders, descenders, and a throw Sherril throw line kit and know how to use them. I know most saddle hunters use climbing sticks but is there any reason they don’t use something along the lines of SRT (Single Rope Technique it’s an arborist thing where you essentially attach your rope to the tree and use a pair of ascenders with foot loops to climb the rope rather than trying to climb the tree itself) I’m thinking I could pre-stage some trees with some cheap paracord as pull lines ahead of time so I don’t have to buy a whole mess of static. Then when I get to the tree I want to hunt I use use that to pull my expensive static over the high anchor. Basically just get up the tree using arborist methods since I already know how to do that, except have it prepared ahead of time with a pull line to get my main line up to avoid making a bunch of noise using a throw bag (or trying to use it in the dark for morning hunts). End of the day, getting up into the tree is the easy part for me. But what’s the learning curve on shooting from it though? Is it something I can pick up in a week or so by doing an hour or 2 or practice every evening? (I’m thinking along the lines of position my 3 targets at different locations/ranges, then climb up with like 2 dozen arrows, practice shooting those targets, then climb back down, retrieve my arrows and relocate the targets to other directions/ranges, and repeat) Honestly whatever I do, saddle or not, my hunting season is still ruined. I get absolutely furious every single time I go out there, much less sit in a tree stand, to the point that it isn't even fun and just puts me in a bad mood. Stealing **** is about the most fucked up thing you can do to another hunter. It not only means that they’re hunting gear is gone and they’re gonna have to spend a small fortune to replace it, but even after that they’re still gonna constantly have it in the back of their mind that their **** got stolen and it might happen again. They ought to extend castle doctrine to hunting properties. It would only take one or 2 people getting ventilated while stealing treestands and hunting gear before word got around and the hunter/thieves went back to pocketing doe estrus at Walmart.
