Gamblers have Vegas and Atlantic City. Bowhunters chasing Pope and Young whitetails have Northeast MT or more specific The Milk River.

The Milk River has been a long time favorite of mine since I started working at Realtree in 1995. No secretes about this spot anymore, lush fields of alfalfa and limited bedding around the rivers edge make evening bowhunting a guaranteed chess match everyday as multiple record book bucks file into the food source to forage on the tender chutes of alfalfa. It is not uncommon for any given evening to have over a hundred deer in a 50 acre alfalfa field. Common as well is to have a quarter of these deer to be nice bucks sporting good head gear. The chess match comes into play when you are trying to pick the perfect tree or ground blind for one of these shooters to come by in bow range.

This year was my first year to go back and hunt the Milk since 2004. Even though I had hunted other areas in MT and even some River Bottoms similar, it still wasn’t the same as where I cut my teeth River bottom hunting.

Again, Phillip Culpepper was joining me only this time he had a cameraman with him, as he was to be a hunter for the Roadtrips TV show. Scouting hard in the mornings, we were overwhelmed at the amount of deer in the fields and better than that was the quality of nice bucks. The hunt was on, and for the next 5 days we mixed it up with the early season whitetails.

On my last afternoon, I found a nice velvet ten point that came within range and luckily the Beman Bone Collector shaft flew true and after the 100 grain Tekan worked on his lungs for about 80 yards I had a 152 inch buck to put in the back of the truck. There was plenty of drama on this hunt that viewers will see when the Roadtrips show airs next July 10, so we don’t want to let all the info out on this blog. One thing I will say is that Producer Culpepper dropped his best buck ever.. 179 P&Y! This will be a must see next year and on Monster Bucks DVD’s.