Whitetail Wizard

The roads become a gumbo of slick clay, soft bottoms, water on top of the ground in places and stuck vehicles. A slippery road puts vehicles off the road and there they sit, stuck.

Trucks with four-wheel-drive are even worse. People think 4WD is great. Stuck in the mud causes owners of many such vehicles to believe they can rock it back and forth to get out.

Wrong. The only thing a stuck 4WD vehicle does is it enables it to get stuck even worse. We’ve had 4WD trucks get stuck up to their axles.

We had a windy and dry week two weeks ago, and it enabled me to get some roads worked on but none were finished. Now, after the rain, it’s back to square one—repairing roads.

Several of us have third-season turkey tags and we need to get to some of the back areas for gobblers. If the roads stay bad, we may not be able to go through the gates and have to look for other areas to hunt.

Every good thing has some bad points. This ranch has superb deer habitat, but to sample its wonders means being able to get there. That can be challenging at times.

Twenty-five years ago, after I blazed a trail and built what is now known as the Pollington Expressway, which is nothing more than a dirt road around the inside perimeter, we began hunting the back portions of my land. Some years, with heavy rain or snow, the biggest experience of the day was getting to your stand.

It would be a challenging ride, and much of the drive was spent going sideways down the road; wheels churning, mud flying, and too many stuck vehicles. The challenge often wasn’t getting them unstuck but getting a bulldozer or tractor back to where they were and then getting everyone and their vehicles outside of the fence.

This ground holds water, and it takes time to dry out. It doesn’t dry out in two or three days instead it may take two or three weeks before I can smooth out the roads.

It doesn’t seem to bother the deer because they don’t travel too far through the mud. They stay fairly close to their food sources, and bed down nearby. Deer hooves aren’t really made for whitetails to walk well through sucking mud.

I’d hesitate to guess how many thousands of dollars I’ve spent buying gravel to build up these roads. It seems that traffic keeps pounding fill and gravel into the mix, and it will help for a year or so, but in many cases it seems as if the roads are just eating the fill dirt and gravel I put down.

Fill dirt and gravel has been added almost every year since the ranch has been enclosed, and yet it appears we are making very little headway. The one thing that works when the roads get soft is to stay off they for a few days.

It’s when road begin to get rutted, and rain or snow falls, a vehicle will start to slide, and that is when the rutting begins. Once ruts are in place, it become nearly impossible to get through. We often use ATVs to get from place to place but there have been times when they get buried as well.

Spring and late fall are the worst times of all to travel ranch roads. We do it when we must, which often means at least once a day, but when they are really bad, we limit traffic to the absolute minimum to prevent further damage.