Vicki's Colorado Muley - Colorado
Vicki and her Colorado Muley!
A good day of hunting!
Hunter: Vicki Cianciarulo
Cameraman: Ralph Cianciarulo
One of my favorite places to hunt is out in Colorado for deer. We don’t hunt with an outfitter while we are there, just with a couple of our dear friends. Every year Ralph and I head down to Colorado for whitetail or mule deer and love it! This year Ralph and Zendal headed down to Colorado a few days before me to try to get a few extra days in before I was going to arrive. They did a lot of scouting and glassing trying to get the deer figured out and where we needed to be sitting. They did put a couple stalks on some muley bucks, but to no prevail.
Gary and I headed down on November 14th arriving on the 15th. We stayed at what they called the ‘Man Cave’ when we got down there, kind of scary! Ralph was doing great catching mice; I think he ended up with about 20 mice in two weeks!! The first few days down there I filmed Ralph hunting mule deer, stalking & sitting in our Ameristep blinds. One night we had a huge mule deer buck in at less than 10 yards, snort wheezing at another buck, but unfortunately for Ralph, it was too dark to film! That actually happened a couple nights in a row! We did get up on some muley spotting & stalking, but never got close enough to get a shot at the buck!
We traded out spots, and it was my turn to hunt! We hunted a couple different spots and had some smaller deer around, but no shooters. We set up a new stand in a single cotton wood situated in a little opening right between two groups on tamaracks. The first afternoon, the deer were already all over in the opening. We sat down and waited for them to move on back into the tamaracks heading towards the green field. We tried to catch up with them to try for a shot out in the field, but they disappeared on us.
The next afternoon we spotted a mule deer doe bedded down about 80 yards from our tree. We were able to sneak to the tree making sure we kept the big cottonwood’s trunk between us and the doe. Ralph climbed up first and I went up second. As I climbed, very slowly, I noticed there were actually about 5 does & yearlings bedded down! I still can’t believe we were able to get in the stand without blowing the deer out of there! My muscles were so full of adrenaline by the time I got into the stand; I didn’t think I would be able to stand up!
The does walked away about 10 minutes after we got into the stand. Thirty minutes later we had a small forky-mule deer buck walk from the north to the south, all the way around our tree! I told Ralph that now all we needed was a bigger buck to do the same thing! Well as the forky was walking away, I heard some noise coming from the south in the tamaracks and out popped a doe and I saw a bigger buck! He was right on her and I think he was in love! He followed her out of the tamaracks and right into my shooting lane at 23 yards!! I drew back my new Hoyt AlphaMax set at 54 pounds and released my NAP HellRazor at him! He hardly jumped and went right back to following his girlfriend around the tree we were in. He dropped at about 40 yards from our stand! I thought my legs were killing me before, wow! This was the second mule deer that I have ever taken, and both of them have been from treestands! Wow! I want to thank Billy & Gayla for being our friends & family, and of course thanks to Ralphie for being there with me and filming it all!!