By Doug Rose

Name the common denominator among the following scenarios:

• It is mid-September. You have spent a long day in the saddle, following a steadily climbing trail into the north Cascade Mountains' Pasayten Wilderness Area. The sky is flawlessly blue, the temperature is in the 60s, and your old Model 70 Winchester .270 is secured to the scabbard on the flanks of an Appaloosa. There are only a couple more miles to your base camp, from which you will hunt mule deer for the next five days.
• It is early October. Before daylight you had launched your boat, the one you use in the summer to fish for Hanford Reach salmon, at a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers boat ramp on the upper Snake River. You are nearing the dry creek mouth where you will beach your boat to hunt the brushy canyon above the river for white-tailed deer with a muzzleloader.
• It is mid-December. Rain has fallen for the past three days, and you can no longer see Hood Canal far below your stand on a ridge above Thorndyke Bay. You have hiked up to your stand every morning for a week. There was plenty of sign around the intersection of trails in front of your blind during the rut, but none of the blacktail bucks you saw earlier in the season have come within bow range.

The common theme? These events all took place in Washington. Indeed, Evergreen State deer hunters have a wider range of hunting opportunity than hunters enjoy in virtually any other region in the country. This is true in terms of species - with blacktails, whitetails and mule deer inhabiting the state - and the settings and habitats where they live.

The mule deer scenario above, for example, occurred during the September high buck hunt, which opens a number of wilderness areas to modern firearms hunters. At the other end of the calendar, a handful of extended archery seasons allow hunting through December. It's true that any Washington resident who cannot find a deer hunting situation to their liking simply isn't looking.

In addition to wide-ranging hunting options, Washington rifle, archery and blackpowder deer hunters also enjoy some of the simplest hunting regulations in the West. It is still possible to purchase a general-season deer license over the counter, and except for a handful of units, a hunter can choose to hunt any region of the state in any given year. Those who want solitude and the chance of seeing older, branch-antlered bucks have the option of applying for permit hunts, which greatly increase their odds of success. With an extensive network of wilderness areas and gated forest roads, hunters willing to put some boot leather between themselves and their vehicle can also enjoy an old-time wilderness hunt.

So what are the prospects for the upcoming 2004 seasons? The year is shaping up to be quite similar to last year. After the once-every-three-years management overhaul in 2003, no major regulations or permit structures are anticipated. Similarly, little evidence exists of significant winter mortality last year, further assisting the continued recovery of mule and white-tailed deer in eastern Washington. On the west side of the Cascade Mountains, blacktail opportunities will also be similar to recent seasons, although hair loss syndrome, habitat degradation and predation continue to impact some local herds.

As we do every year, Washington-Oregon Game & Fish has spoken to biologists and wildlife managers to help you enjoy a successful deer season - whatever and however you choose to hunt - this fall.

For most sportsmen, the mule deer is emblematic of the American West, commonly associated with open range and expansive vistas. Unlike its cover-loving black-tailed relatives, it typically uses its eyesight, speed and propensity for living in rough country to avoid predators. Trophy mulies are especially fond of difficult country, of rimrock, river breaks and the edges of high-country timber. In Washington, the east slopes of the Cascade Mountains mark the boundary of a significant range that extends into Idaho, Canada and beyond the Columbia and Snake Rivers.

Photo by Michael H. Levy

After a staggering series of winterkills in the 1990s, which resulted in shortened hunting seasons and antler-point restrictions, mule deer herds have rebounded impressively in many areas. Biologists attribute the increases in part to the regulations, but they also point to the fact that eastern Washington hasn't suffered a hard winter in six years. That has allowed young deer - those most vulnerable to winterkill - to survive in good numbers. As the fawns of one year become the spikes and 3-pointers of succeeding years, the overall numbers of deer and the ratio of mature bucks has steadily improved. Initial reports point to a continued good carryover of animals as a result of last year's relatively mild winter.

"It began looking like we were going to have a real winter," said Scott Fitkin, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's Okanogan County wildlife biologist. "But it ended up looking pretty good."

The Methow Valley is Washington's mule deer hunting epicenter. Until a brutal winter struck in 1992, hunters killed as many as 10,000 deer annually in the region. However, both the number of hunters and harvest nose dived in the late 1990s, when shortened seasons coincided with low herd numbers. As the number of deer and hunter success rates improved in recent years, hunters have returned to the county, and last year the WDFW expanded the season from nine to 14 days, which opened a second weekend.

The most productive units in 2004 will once again be the ones where the foothills intersect lower elevation water and cover - specifically the Pearrygin, Chewuch and Sinlahekin game management units, which each yielded more than 300 bucks in 2002. In the Okanogan, hunter success depends to a great degree on the weather. If an early snow pushes deer out of high country summer range, hunters will do better than average; if it doesn't, the bulk of the harvest will occur late in the season.

Outside the Okanogan, mule deer are still recovering in Chelan County, where the Tyee fire of 1996 destroyed considerable winter range. However, some of the state's largest mule deer racks in recent years have come from this region, in particular from the Entiat Unit (featured along with other Chelan County areas next month in Washington-Oregon Game & Fish).

In Yakima County, the units along Manastash Ridge - the Manastash, Taneam and Teanaway - are expected to once again turn out a good number of mule deer, along with a few trophies. The sagebrush flats and shrub/steppe of the lower Columbia Basin are no longer a secret among deer hunters, but they continue to produce some of the region's largest deer, especially on permit-only areas, such as the legendary Desert Unit west of Potholes Reservoir, and on private property in Region 3's Esquastzel GMU. Mule deer are also widely distributed in eastern Klickitat County, although nearly all hunting there occurs on private land.

Mule deer compete with whitetails in the eastern third of the state. As a rule of thumb, they are usually more concentrated at slightly higher elevations and in more rugged and drier areas than whitetails will be found.

The Blue Mountains' deer numbers do not appear to have yet recovered as well as mulies in north-central Washington. The most productive units will be those in foothills where a mixture of habitats provide forage and cover. As in the Columbia Basin, the farmlands in the Cheney and Roosevelt units produce some tremendous bucks, but access is not usually easily obtained.

Access is much better north of Spokane, where hunters find a mixture of public and private timberlands. The Huckleberry, 49 Degrees North, Mount Spokane and Sherman units are among the region's most popular and productive. Ferry County's Sherman Unit is especially well known for its strong population of mule deer, while the Selkirk Unit, hard on the Idaho/British Columbia borders, provides low success rates but an opportunity to see truly large deer.

This resilience has also resulted in an ongoing expansion of the deer into new range, especially to the west. Whitetails now provide more than 35 percent of Washington's total deer harvest, despite the fact that they inhabit a relatively small portion of the state.

The historic whitetail hotspots in Washington are clustered in its northeast corner. During the early 1990s, several of these counties actually allowed hunters to take two white-tailed deer annually, and the harvest in PMU 13 exceeded 20,000 deer some seasons. As with Okanogan mulies, population numbers declined after the rough winters of the '90s, but they have come back fairly strongly. However, the proportion of older, branch-antlered bucks remains depressed.

Last year, the WDFW raised the possibility of imposing antler-point restrictions, but the concept met stiff resistance, and it was not adopted. Other than trophy-class deer, hunters can expect to see quite a few deer in traditionally productive units, such as Huckleberry, 49 Degrees North, Mount Spokane and Three Forks. Look for them in brushy river bottoms, abandoned orchards, and transitional forest habitats. Bowhunters in particular are drawn to the Sherman Unit, because it has a long late-season whitetail hunt with no competition from other late seasons.

White-tailed deer also account for a significant part of the harvest in the Blue Mountains and lower Snake River. The best way to connect with a Blue Mountain whitetail is to obtain access to low-elevation private agricultural holdings. Failing that, hunters may want to concentrate on Umatilla National Forest, WDFW and Department of Natural Resources properties in the foothills and along the Snake and Grande Ronde rivers. As mentioned above, the Corps of Engineers Lower Snake River compensation plan holdings allow big-game hunting in many areas, and hunters with boats have a good chance at seeing whitetails and mule deer in canyons and riparian areas.

In recent decades, white-tailed deer have expanded their range west from the Kettle River toward Okanogan County. This is historically mule deer country, but growing numbers of hunters focus on whitetails.

The timbered hills of Region 2's Okanogan East GMU are especially productive, and during 2002 the unit actually turned out more than 600 deer, a large proportion of which were whitetails, and they are also increasingly taken in the region's Sinlahekin Unit. "The whitetails are usually concentrated east of the Okanogan River," the WDFW's Fitkin said.

Although they are more closely related to mule deer genetically, blacktails actually behave more like whitetails. They typically employ stealth and elusive actions for defense, rather than speed and distance. As a result, they tend to be quite comfortable in areas where human activity such as timber harvest, subdivisions and agriculture take place. They are also homebodies, often spending their lives within as small a geographic area as one square mile.

In recent years, southwest Washington's Region 5 has been the region's most dependable blacktailed deer producer. This is largely a function of the fact that large areas remain controlled by timber companies whose harvest rotations produce a varied age structure of vegetation.

These include older stands of timber that provide cover, younger trees that furnish safety and thermal corridors, and open areas that produce shrubs and other browse vegetation that species such as deer prefer. This mosaic of habitats results in healthy deer populations, and these forests turn out the highest overall harvest and hunter success ratios in western Washington.

The Ryderwood, Coweeman, Mossyrock and Willapa Hills units will once again be the best bets for hunters, as will the Columbia Gorge's extremely productive West Klickitat and Grayback units, which combined for more than 1,100 bucks in 2002.

However, the shock waves from the Weyerhaeuser Company's decision to close the majority of roads in its St. Helens Tree Farm are still reverberating through the hunting community. The decision, which mirrors restrictions on many industrial forests throughout the state, was especially unpopular among older hunters. But Weyerhaeuser continues to allow walk-in access to the majority of its holdings. To the north, the recent sale of the company's White River and Snoqualmie tree farms, which furnish the best Puget Sound-area hunting, to the John Hancock Insurance Company raised alarms among hunters. Fortunately, the insurance conglomerate has indicated that it will allow hunting this year, but most, if not all, roads will be blocked.

The WDFW's Region 6 has edged out Region 5 in total harvest the last few years. The Skookumchuck is the hands-down most productive GMU in the region, turning out upwards of 800 deer annually. This is largely attributable to Weyerhaeuser's Vail Tree Farm, where vehicle access has been permitted on weekends, while walk-in hunters have been able to hunt during the week.

On the coast, the North River and Fall River units, which tend to have large road closure areas, are the most productive. The Simpson Timber Company manages most of the southern foothills of the Olympic Mountains, and there are miles of gated roads in the upper Wynoochee and Satsop valleys where deer numbers are good and hunters willing to work have fairly good odds.

The Merrill-Ring Company's Private Land Wildlife Management Area, "Pysht Tree Farm," tends to be the most productive area on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula.

The Coyle and Olympic units produce good numbers in the northeast Olympic's "rain shadow." The Deschutes, Minot Peak and Mashel units are relatively close to Puget Sound population centers but continue to turn out good deer numbers.