Truth From The Stand Deer Hunting Podcast

Every fall we build the rut up into something it almost never is. We burn vacation days, watch for the cold front, and walk in expecting the woods to hand over a buck because the calendar says it should. Then reality shows up. Empty sits. Sign that looked hot a week ago has gone stale. A buck you were counting on is either dead, nocturnal, or three farms over chasing something you’ll never see. Chad Sylvester came back on to talk about exactly that, but first he had to tell me about elk. He just got back from his trip, and like most good elk stories, it was a mix of things going right and things going sideways in a hurry. Mountain hunting has a way of humbling you even when it’s going well, and Chad brought that perspective straight back into the deer woods. Most of this conversation lives in the gap between what we expect from the rut and what it actually delivers. The mental grind is real. After a few slow days it’s easy to start second-guessing everything: your spot, your setup, your whole plan. What we kept coming back to is that the answer is usually on the ground, not in your head. Fresh sign beats old sign every time. A scrape line that was smoking two weeks ago doesn’t mean much if nothing’s touched it since. You have to be honest about what the woods are telling you today, not what they told you last week. That led into one of the bigger debates of the episode: when do you scout, and when do you hunt? Sitting a stand that’s gone cold because it’s the plan is a great way to waste the best days of the year. But wandering around too much can blow out the exact deer you’re after. We got into how each of us makes that call, and why being proactive almost always beats waiting for something to change on its own. We also talked about hunting pressure. By the rut, deer have been dealing with people for weeks, and the bucks still walking around have learned from it. Adjusting to that, instead of pretending it isn’t happening, is a big part of what separates productive sits from frustrating ones. We closed on something I’ve been leaning on hard this year: minimum standards. Set them before every trip. The hours you’ll put in, the scouting you’ll do, the decisions you’ll make no matter how you feel at 4 a.m. on day five. You can’t control whether a buck shows up. You can control whether you held up your end of the deal. If the rut’s been kicking your butt this year, you’re not alone. Give this one a listen before your next sit. SHOW NOTES AND LINKS: —Truth From The Stand Merch —Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras — Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15  —Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20 —Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10 —Check out Faceoff E-Bikes —Waypoint TV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some guys kill a deer. Cameron Derr fills tags, season after season, and that’s a different thing entirely. Luck can hand you one buck. It can’t hand you a track record. So when Cameron sat down with me, I wanted to get past the results and into the decisions that keep producing them. We started where every deer camp eventually ends up arguing: the moon. Everybody has a theory, and most of those theories line up suspiciously well with the days we already had off work. We dug into whether moon phases actually move deer or just give us a story to tell ourselves, and where the moon belongs on the list next to the things we know matter. Cameron also just launched his own podcast, and his approach caught my attention. Keep it digestible. Give people something they can use on their next sit instead of an hour of theory they’ll forget by the parking lot. That’s a good rule for a show, and honestly a pretty good rule for hunting. Then we got to the part I was most excited about: ground hunting early season whitetails in the Dakotas. No big timber, no perfect tree, just open country, summer patterns, and deer that can see you coming from a long way off. It’s a high-wire act. Some days it comes together fast. Some days a buck takes one wrong turn and the whole plan is dust. That unpredictability is exactly why it’s so addictive. The back half of the conversation went deeper into what really separates consistent hunters from everybody else. Patience. Observation. Watching deer long enough to understand what they’re doing instead of guessing. We talked wind, and how one bad sit with the wrong breeze can undo weeks of careful work. We talked about adapting when the ground changes under you, including what happens when the loggers show up and the woods you thought you knew turn into something else overnight. Cameron shared stories about specific deer, the lessons those bucks taught him, and the preparation that goes into a hunt long before he ever walks in. None of it is flashy. All of it is the kind of stuff that quietly stacks up into filled tags. If you’ve ever wondered why some hunters seem to connect every year while you’re still waiting on the right moon, give this one a listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nobody needs help getting out of bed on opening morning. The gear’s been laid out for a week and you’re awake before the alarm. That’s motivation, and on opener it’s free. The morning that decides your season is the one three weeks later. Same 4:15 alarm, the fourteenth time you’ve heard it, no shooter in ten days, and a very reasonable voice in your head making a very reasonable case for sleeping in just this once. That morning is what this episode is about. In 2024 I hunted one deer in the Pennsylvania mountains for more than thirty-five days straight. A legitimate Boone and Crockett buck living in country where deer like that almost never exist. I lived out of my travel trailer, hunted mornings, worked remotely through the middle of the day, and went right back in every afternoon. On October 11th I saw him on the hoof for the first time. Then he vanished. A week of not finding his sign later, the excitement was gone. What got my feet on the floor after that wasn’t motivation. It was something I’ve started calling truthful lies. Small, technically true things I told myself every morning. A big scrape I hadn’t seen before. Old rubs from past seasons. The tallest rub I’d ever found in those mountains. None of it was proof. All of it got me to the truck. From there I get into why motivation acts like weather, and why Angela Duckworth’s Grit is a book I come back to every fall. Enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare. Effort counts twice. In hunting terms, that means the small, boring reps nobody brags about. A few arrows a day through your full shot sequence. Ten minutes on the map. Logging every sit, especially the empty ones. Enough sleep and strength to be sharp on day twenty instead of just present. Before the season, during it, and after. I also break down the three places guys fizzle: when the novelty wears off, when fatigue turns into one excuse a week (I own one of mine from this season), and when a miss guts you. That last one comes with a story from a sixteen-day Midwest public land trip where I missed a big buck twice, kept getting up anyway, and on the final evening, truck already packed, killed a deer I didn’t know existed the day before. Then the practical part. Build the floor, not the ceiling. Set minimum daily standards for your bow, your intel, and your body, plus one rule for the hard mornings. Mine is simple. The alarm is not a question. And yes, I tell you how the Pennsylvania deer ended. It isn’t the ending you’d guess. Motivation’s going to show up for opener. It always does. This one’s about what gets you out of bed when it doesn’t. SHOW NOTES AND LINKS: —Truth From The Stand Merch —Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras — Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15  —Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20 —Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10 —Check out Faceoff E-Bikes —Waypoint TV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every year around the back half of October, something shifts. The woods go from feeling like early season leftovers to feeling like something is about to happen. Scrapes open up overnight. Licking branches get torn apart. If you’re paying attention, there’s a short window in there that a lot of hunters sleep through while they wait for November. That window is what Jake Hofer and I dug into on this episode. Jake spent last season chasing specific deer, and he came on the show to unpack what that actually looked like. Not the highlight reel. The encounters that didn’t work out, the sits that taught him something, and the slow grind of figuring out how a mature buck lives. Every one of those close calls made him a better hunter, and that’s the part that never makes it onto social media. We spent some time there too. Hunting culture has changed. Social media has connected us in ways that are good for sharing knowledge and staying aware of the legislation that affects all of us. It has also turned a lot of deer hunting into a scoreboard. Jake and I talked about what we’ve gained, what we’ve lost, and where deer hunting in Illinois stands right now. Then we got into the meat of it. Homebody bucks vs gypsy bucks. Some bucks live in a tight core area and you can build a plan around them. Others show up for a week, vanish, and turn up three farms over. Knowing which one you’re dealing with changes everything about how and when you hunt him. Seasonal shifts move both kinds, and Jake had sharp takes on reading those changes before they catch you flat-footed. Trail camera data was the other big piece. A stack of night photos can make you feel great about a buck that will never give you a daylight opportunity. Daylight photos, even one or two, tell a completely different story. We broke down how to read your cards honestly instead of hopefully. Finally, we talked about picking your days. Weather fronts, specific dates on the calendar, and when it’s worth burning your best stand versus holding it for the right moment. Scrape week sets up November. Hunt it smart and you walk into the rut with real information instead of guesses. If you’re staring at trail camera pictures right now trying to decide when to go in, this one’s for you. SHOW NOTES AND LINKS: —Truth From The Stand Merch —Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras — Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15  —Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20 —Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10 —Check out Faceoff E-Bikes —Waypoint TV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It had been way too long since Ryan and I sat down together. Long enough that we had some catching up to do, and long enough that a lot had changed — most of it on his end. Ryan spent a big chunk of the past stretch recovering from a serious arm injury. If you've never had your body take hunting off the table, even temporarily, it's hard to explain what that does to your head. The physical rehab is one thing. The mental side is the part nobody warns you about. Ryan was forced to slow down, and in slowing down, he had to take a hard look at what actually mattered — family first, then what he really wanted out of his time in the woods. That reset showed up in how he hunted last season. Ryan walked away from a lot of the tech. Fewer trail cameras, less leaning on years of historical data, a lot more trusting his gut. That's not a knock on cameras — I run them, you probably run them — but there's a point where the data starts hunting you instead of the other way around. You end up chasing a buck that was in a spot two Novembers ago instead of the deer that's there right now. A big part of our conversation was about hunting mountain country, which is its own animal. Deer don't move through steep terrain the way they do in farm country, and the sign doesn't always tell you what you want it to. Ryan's approach leans hard on postseason scouting — getting in after the season when you can't hurt anything, walking the ground, and figuring out how deer actually use it. From there, he hunts more aggressively and stays flexible. If a spot isn't producing, he moves. No marrying a stand because it worked once. We also got a little nostalgic. Both of us miss some of the old-school way of doing things, when it was just you, a map, some boot leather, and whatever you could figure out on your own. There's a version of hunting that's more about solving a puzzle than checking an app, and I think a lot of guys are drifting back toward it. What I appreciated most is where Ryan's head is at now. He's enjoying the experience more and worrying less about the outcome. That's a hard place to get to, and it usually takes something going sideways to get you there. We wrapped up talking about plans for this fall and how good it is to hunt with friends again. If you're stuck in a rut — too much data, not enough instinct — this one's for you. SHOW NOTES AND LINKS: —Truth From The Stand Merch —Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras — Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15  —Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20 —Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10 —Check out Faceoff E-Bikes —Waypoint TV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices