Awesome Buck With A Awesome History …. Congratulations 🦌

Congrats!!!  That is a stud of a buck!!!  And that post was damn near as long as the podcast!  Lol. 

Nice buck but you wrote a hole story looks looks like more than I have ever written 

Great story on your journey with this buck. Congratulations!🦌👍👊

Was the arrow still in him or did he shake it out on his death run?

@Seth W the arrow broke off when he ran into cover. We found the back half about 60 yards from the shot. 

This is a buck that my family and I had been after for 4 years in the Nicollet National Forest in Northern Oconto County. We had been running multiple trail cameras around a large lowland cedar swamp with dense pine and spruce thickets. For 5 summers in a row, my dad and I had gotten a pair of bucks on camera that were always together. When there was one, the other wasn’t far behind. We watched them on camera for 4 summers before I finally decided that we needed to get much more serious and aggressive about hunting these big mature bucks that we came to call Curly and Ice Pick, both named after the look of their brow tines. 
The early fall of 2014 my dad and I moved ALL of our trail cameras into the surrounding area where we had gotten the bucks each previous summer. With nearly 20 cameras covering trails and mock scrapes in the vast area, we began to see the bucks spreading out for their fall range. 
The weekend of Halloween that fall, I found myself hunting a spot I hoped one of the bucks might move through in the morning, but after a  slow morning I decided to do a big walk to scout for fresh sign and pull camera cards. After checking cards I was pretty disappointed. I had the big buck we named Curly Hair on all of my cameras but the photos were after 10 pm. No good chance to close in on him. As I sulked around, contemplating where to hunt that evening, my dad said that he had scouted an area much further SW of where we had been focusing but it had an oak ridge with good sign on it and an area where it looked like two bucks had fought. We both took our mobile stands and went into hunt that area for the first time.  I set up along the edge of a thick pine transition near the main oak ridge where a good run line came up onto the flat. About 30 minutes before sunset, I heard a deer approaching from the thicket but south of me about 65 yards. The deer emerged and I saw it was a really good buck. He worked a scrape and licking branch for a few minutes before starting out toward the oak flat but he was going to come downwind into the scent stream so I quickly sent two short grunts out toward the thicket in front of him. He licked his nose and immediately came straight toward me. I took my shot as he quartered toward me at about 22 yards and he spun back into the thick spruces he came from. 
The next morning, after a very sleepless night, my fiancé, mother, father, and myself all set out to find my buck. We followed a sparse blood trail which mainly consisted of small droplets that were being sprayed out of the bucks mouth and nose as the entry was high just behind the shoulder and no exit hole. After 120 yards we found what was my biggest buck to date, a monster bodied big woods 10 point that we knew for 5 years as curly. My fiancé at the time and father had each found one of his sheds the previous spring and the history we had built with this awesome national forest buck is something that will make this hunt one of the most special I will ever have

Curly: A 5 Year Journey

Derek M

Are you sure?

Whitetail Buck

Tyler C

Ryan L

Tom R

Kurt K

Ryan C

Ted J

Aden P

Pat C

David N

Seth W

Derek M