Hunting Public land evokes images and stories of many orange hats grouped together shooting each other !

But when you don't have access to private land, you have to go public!  This past weekend for opening day of deer season, my buddy Dale and I went down to Clinton Missouri, around Truman Lake to hunt.  There is a lot of pulic land around Truman lake for hunting, i've read estimate of up to 75,000 acres.

The key is scouting, scouting, scouting, and lots of walking.

We ended up not doing as much scouting as we wanted, but found what we thought was a nice area with lots of potential.  We didn't see much.

There was a lot of shooting around us, but they must have been poor shots as we didn't see anyone with a deer.

Lots of "road hunters", many would drive down a path, jump out for 30 minutes and then walk back, not sure what these guys were doing; maybe they weren't seeing much either and looking for a better place.

Ended up having some of these road hunters blast 3 rounds in quick succession at some running does (there's a good idea !), and scared them right to the side of me, about 25 yards.  Unfortunately they were so spooked that I was unable to swing around 45 degrees and get a shot off, so I just got to stare at them for a bit and hope to see them another day.

I finally found some private land to hunt for no cost, we'll see how that goes next.