Non residents
South Dakota
What is the biggest complaint about nonresident hunters in South Dakota? I’m primarily talking about archery deer. I took my first trip out there in sept this year and had a great overall experience. Everywhere we went people were overly helpful. I expected to be looked down on based on some general comments on this forum and other sites too. Thanks
Pressure on limited entry public tracts.
Hey brotsky, what do you mean by limited entry? Do you mean by drawing or physically limited entry? Thanks joe
I call them limited entry because they are limited for gun hunters. I'm not a big gun hunter but that is where some of the issues are rising. Very limited tags and access for the gun crew but archers have unlimited access and tags. There's 6-8 such areas in western SD. It's a complaint the gun lobby has against archers in general and I feel we will see limitations as a result in the future.
Hey MnHunter, I am planning a DIY whitetail bowhunt for next fall in SD. Can you tell me a little about your trip? What area did you travel to? Anything you would do differently?
Hey UPhunter, we stayed at a campground in Belle fourche called Wyatt’s hideaway. They have cabins that we stayed in for 60 bucks a night. We hunted walk-in and blm land north of town off of 85.
There is a ton of blm /walk-in land in the area but we found that most of it is great for antelope and not deer. But we did find small pockets that held good deer numbers both mule deer and whitetail. We found that when you find some elevation change amongst endless miles of flat land that’s where the deer were.
As far as doing something different I would consider the weather. We went the first half of September and we hunted in 80 to 90 degree weather.
Feel free to pm me for any thing I missed. Thanks joe
I hunted in NW SD (rifle with my pop - 83). We had only good experiences when dealing with others - although the others just wanted to drive up and down the roads and look for deer feeding in the fields. I hiked one day 19.74 miles according to OnX and saw one other human track. The quality of deer was better than our area in MT - probably because this zone had a limited draw.
Also spotted the biggest elk I have seen in the wild. The mass on the main beams were amazing. We were both bedded in sunny spots on opposite hillsides, 145 yards apart. I spent an hour just watching him thru binoculars - well, and napping too...
It was a great hunt, but with the draw getting longer, it might have been my last.
