Whitetail Chess Match

When good friend Josh Sparks from Midwest Whitetail asked if I wanted to head to Illinois with him, there wasn’t a second thought. Mother nature delivered the challenge of low pressure, rain, and storm fronts, but staying mobile and getting aggressive helped us put the pieces together throughout the week to get a great buck in bow range.

Play by Play Breakdown

Ultimately, without lidar, I don’t think I fill my tag on this hunt. It was lidar that helped us identify the thermal hub where I ended up killing my buck. The extreme detail of understanding the terrain before getting there was key to our success.

Having spent a weekend in August checking out the property, using the Tracker to map out the main road systems was a major advantage to finding our best entrance and exit routes into sets.

When hunting mobile, my map was a mess of potential sets, and attaching Optimal Wind to all of them made it quick and easy to eliminate options.

With having buddies in camp, we were constantly sharing our different sets, where we found fresh scrapes, and other pieces of the puzzle that were just a text away.