The south side of the Olympic Peninsula isn’t the first place Washington hunters think of when blacktail season rolls around. Maybe it should be! Photo by Gary Lewis.

When Evergreen State hunters think of good places to fill a deer tag, the Olympic Peninsula isn’t usually the first destination that pops to mind.

The peninsula’s much better known for elk hunting, especially in the rain forest valleys on the west end. Moreover, when hunters do talk about deer hunting in the Olympics, they tend to mention units on the northern part of the peninsula, bordering the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They think of the Pysht Unit on the west side, and the Olympic and Coyle units on the northeast rain shadow.

Until recently, few hunters outside the region even heard of the Satsop, Wynoochee and Skokomish game management units. But in recent years, these three units have typically combined for nearly 1,000 blacktails. Year-in, year-out, they’re the most productive deer units on the Olympic Peninsula.

The numbers speak for themselves. During the 2005 season -- the last for which harvest reports are available -- hunters killed 352 bucks in the Wynoochee Unit, 396 in the Satsop and 134 in the Skokomish. Those numbers compare with 204 in the Olympic, 147 in the Coyle, and 100 in the Pysht units.

The units on the Olympics’ south flank also dwarf the deer harvest in the traditional rain forest units -- the Clearwater, Matheny and Quinault Ridge -- which had 41, 2 and 28 bucks, respectively.

For decades, the excellent deer hunting in the southern Olympics was kept pretty close to the vest by hunters in Montesano and McLeary, Shelton and Aberdeen.

But in this era of the Internet, it’s impossible to keep good hunting areas a secret.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife also now posts their annual Big Game Harvest Reports on-line, where with only a few mouse clicks, anyone can obtain the numbers of deer killed, the number of hunters who hunt a given area, and success rates with various types of weapons

When I first became aware of the new publicity about the Wynoochee and Satsop units and to a lesser extent, the Skokomish, I assumed that a crush of out-of-town hunters would invade the area.

I imagined caravans of big trucks and 4x4s roaming the main routes that parallel the Wynoochee, Satsop and South Fork of the Skokomish river valleys. I figured the clearcuts would bristle with hunter orange on October weekends.

However, that hasn’t really been the case. The number of hunters in these units has actually been on the decline or remained stable for the last 15 years. And with the exception of the Skokomish Unit, which became a 2-point minimum GMU in the 1990s, deer harvest in these units has remained pretty much flat since the early 1990s.

In other words, fewer hunters are killing about the same number of deer. That suggests that hunters who know the area are still regularly getting their buck.

Another change in these units is that higher-elevation timber roads, where deer like to retreat in autumn, are now often gated. Lower-elevation public land that’s easily accessible to vehicles has become increasingly scarce.

All this has made it difficult for casual weekend hunters to fill a deer tag in the southern Olympics. But it’s a compelling combination for independent hunters willing to get away from the crowds.

THE DEER FACTORY
There’s one overriding reason why the southern Olympics produce so many more deer than the other peninsula units -- active timber harvest.

The mountainous core of the peninsula and the upper reaches of the many major rivers lie within the boundaries of Olympic National Park, where both hunting and timber harvest are prohibited.

Olympic National Forest administers thousands of acres of timber adjacent to the park, and large areas of it have been designated “late successional reserves” to protect spotted owls or to preserve fish habitat.

On the southern Olympics, however, a 100-year agreement between Olympic National Forest and the Simpson Timber Company in 1947 allowed the company to harvest federal lands in the national forest.