The trip was a great time as it has been every year. This time we left a day early and stopped by the Cherokee Casino outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma and spent the night and played some poker. We had a good time there and it also allowed us to get up to my parents place in NW OKlahoma on Friday earlier than we usually would make it there. Shortly after we arrived at my parents house, my dad took us over to a new tract of land that he and my uncle bought together. It’s 320 acres that is bordered by the Salt Fork River along it’s northern boundary. When we rode out on this place I nearly passed out. It looks like some of the best whitetail country I’ve ever seen. The river, huge cotton woods, cedars, grass, plum thickets, you name it, this tract of land has it. The only problem Andrew and I figured we were going to have this year was figuring out which stands to hunt because he had too many choices!

Saturday morning was the Oklahoma gun opener and we were both sitting on our stands waiting with anticipation when the sun came up. We both saw several deer, but Andrew didn’t have to wait too long before a buck worthy of his tag came by his stand with a doe. The funny thing was that at first Andrew didn’t realize how big the buck really was. He knew he was a great deer but being very selective on opening morning, he had totally misjudged this deer at first. As the buck came by at about 30 yards from his stand, Andrew was snapping photos of him. Then he noticed all the extra points and trash he had coming off his rack. The amount of character this buck has is awesome. He quickly realized this buck was good enough to shoot on the last day of the hunt, so he was good enough to shoot on the first day of the hunt. Andrew says he went from calm, cool and collected to fumbling around like a fool trying to put the camera down and get his rifle out the window of the deer stand! Thankfully he was successful in quietly getting the crosshairs on the buck and with one well placed shot, Andrew’s buck tag was spent. The doe ran off a ways and stopped, which in hind sight was a fatal error on her part. With one more well placed shot Andrew was out of Oklahoma deer tags!

After the chore of loading up these two big bodied deer and taking them to the check station, we finally got back to my dad’s barn to begin the cleaning process. However, we couldn’t wait to get a tape measure on this buck’s rack. While we both knew this was a big buck and all those extra points would add up, neither Andrew, my dad or myself could imagine exactly how much this buck would score. When I hit the equals sign on the calculator and 160 inches popped up, I told them both I might have made a mistake. Ha! We quickly re-added all the measurements and sure enough the calculator spit out the same number, 160 inches B&C. Wow. Andrew just downed a 160” buck on opening morning of rifle season and he almost passed him up! Needless to say we were all excited and I couldn’t wait to get back on the stand. We had trail camera photos of an even bigger typical 10 pt with two kickers coming off one of his G-2’s.

That evening we were back on the stands and Andrew had his video and digital camera on hand this time so he could take photos and video of any nice bucks that might walk out. It was fairly warm that afternoon with a south wind which was not ideal. About an hour before dark Andrew radioed me to tell me to be sure and be quiet and not talk on the radio for a few minutes…….he was watching the big 10 pt I was after and he was right out in front of him. Darn the luck! I was hunting in another stand across the river but less than ¼ mile away seeing nothing and the guy who has tagged out is watching a 160”+ buck!

The weather got even worse for me. Lows in the high 40’s to low 50’s and getting even warmer and highs in the 70’s with 30 mph winds. The lows just kept getting warmer every night. As luck would have it a big arctic front pushed in the day we headed home. Rather than bore you with another five paragraphs to basically tell you that I didn’t kill a deer, I’ll stop here. I saw a ton of deer and some nice respectable bucks but nothing that fell into our management or trophy category. We had a great time, saw a ton of wildlife and can’t wait to go back next year. Just having Andrew kill an awesome buck was beating the odds and something we are very thankful for. November will be here again before we know it.

- Jason