DIY Mule Deer Hunting with Dusty Coryn – Part 2

Dusty Coryn and his friends have been successfully planning and enjoying DIY mule deer hunting trips across the West for several years. He recently offered some great advice on getting started with your own mule deer hunting adventures which is found in Part 1 of his blog interview by clicking HERE.  If you missed that blog post, you’ll want to check it out.

Here is some more great advice from Dusty and his friends that will help shorten your learning curve and get you on the path to western hunting.

What piece of gear has been the best investment?

 I’d like to think I am not a gear junkie, but unfortunately over the years, I have slowly gotten sucked into the western hunting gear tornado.

Without a doubt, the most important investment has been into my mapping technology. For the first few years, I used the Garmin GPS unit and the onXmaps SD cards. I  recently transitioned to their phone app and have been loving it so far.

Another important investment has been into optics. I follow the “buy once, cry once” motto and have invested a lot of money into high quality glass. High quality binoculars are worth their weight in gold on every hunt, and the same can be said for spotting scopes. It might seem ridiculous to spend thousands on optics, but they are honestly worth every dime. I wish I had made the investment 10 years ago. Having expensive optics is definitely not essential to kill big mule deer, but it sure makes things easier. Being able to throw up a 20-60 power spotting scope and tell exactly how big that buck is 1.5 miles away can save you hours of stalking just to find out the buck is not an animal you’d be interested in taking.

What do you want to improve on in your gear list?

At this point, I have rounded up pretty much all the gear I need, as well as a pile of gear I didn’t really “need” but wanted. The only thing that I plan to purchase this year is the new Garmin Inreach unit. We are starting to plan some hunts that will take us far beyond cell service and it’s important to maintain the ability to communicate with our families as well as emergency services if we ever needed them.

What piece of advice would you give someone who is just starting out, dreams about doing a western hunt and is still putting the pieces together?

 Honestly, my biggest piece of advice would be simply “just do it!”. There are far too many old people sitting in bars wishing they had gone on this hunt or that hunt that never did it because they found excuses. My hunting partners and I decided we were not going to be those people and hold each other accountable throughout the year to make sure we are on track to make these hunts a reality.

If you are on the fence about doing a trip just reach out, ask questions, ask for help, ask for ideas. There are tons of people out here that are willing to divulge our information to get someone to make the jump and take a trip of a lifetime. These trips can be done on limited time and a shoestring budget. It’s really easy for people to find an excuse not to go on a trip, but in reality, it’s just as easy to commit and go.

I have taken 8 people out west and watched over the shoulder as all of them have harvested their first mule deer, for most of them it was a life changing moment. Those memories are just as special to me as they are to them. I enjoy nothing more than sharing my passion for the American west and the western icon that is the mule deer.

What trips are you planning over the next 3-4 years?

We will be hunting Montana again in 2018 and I’m looking forward to it. At some point over the next couple of years, we are planning a trip to Kodiak Island to chase Sitka blacktails, this will be a two-week trip. We will fly into Kodiak, charter a float plane to drop us off at a remote cabin and hunt for 10 days or so with 2-3 tags each. I think we will be able to pull this hunt off for less than $3,000  per person with all expenses included.

The fall of 2019 we will be headed out to Idaho to catch the tail end of a general rifle season with two mule deer buck tags in each of our pockets and high hopes to fill them. After one week in Idaho, we will head back east to Montana and try to fill a mule deer tag there as well. We will be truck camping on this hunt and will have less than $2,000 invested per person after all expenses.

In the spring of 2020 we have a New Zealand adventure planned and will be focusing on hunting red stag during the “roar” on public crown land. This will be a true trip of a lifetime. We plan on renting a “camper van” to keep our gear in and tent camping outside the van for two weeks. We will have the chance to hunt tahr and chamois if we manage to kill our stags early. My brother worked on a dairy farm in NZ back in college, so I have plans to donate the meat from what we harvest with friends of the dairy farmer. This will save us considerable expense. We will be crating up whatever racks and salted capes we are able to harvest and shipping them back to the US together to save on expenses as well. Right now, it looks like we will be able to pull this trip off for $3,500-3,800 per person with all expenses included.

Aside from those trips I have enough points to draw my Wisconsin bear tag, Montana bighorn ewe, Wyoming pronghorn, and south Dakota pronghorn. So, I’ll have to try and squeeze those hunts in between the other adventures along with whatever other hair brain ideas pop into my head in the coming years.

Dusty Coryn  has a Wildlife and Fisheries Management degree from West Virginia University. He is a member of New York Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (NY BHA) and is an avid shed antler collector.