Forget about everything that you think you knew about hunting. If you want to know exactly what works out there in whitetail territory – Clint Campbell of Truth From the Stand podcast will open your eyes. He shows us what being a hunter really means, to throw away your accolades and just get out there and hunt. Learn how Clint put the smack down on a 125 class buck in Ohio despite having never been on the ground before and doing it in three sits. A man that can do that is a man worth listening to. Time to restock your arsenal and remind yourself that whenever we’re in the timber, we’re in whitetail turf. Happy hunting!

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We’re heading out to Pennsylvania and we’re going to meet up with Clint Campbell. A lot of you know Clint Campbell. He’s got a podcast called the Truth From the Stand. He also has an associated blog along with his podcast. What’s Clint sharing with you? He’s sharing with you what it means to be a hunter. He’s sharing with you what it means to just go out there and hunt. Forget about all the possible accolades, forget about everything that you think you knew about hunting and all of the sudden, you figure out, it just didn’t work because you read it on a magazine or whatever. Truth From the Stand is exactly that. He’ll tell you exactly what works for him. You’re going to find out how he put the smack-down on a 125-class buck in Ohio and he was never on the ground before and he did it in three sits. A man that can do that is a man that’s worthwhile to listen to. I welcome Clint Campbell from the Truth From the Stand Podcast.

Listen to the podcast here:

Truth From The Stand With Clint Campbell

It’s one of those things when you’re out there in your hunt. We start to figure some things out. Then you have those moments where you get schooled and get taught. We’re on their turf whenever we’re in the timber. That’s their home and that’s where they are superior to us in just about every way, shape and form. It’s humbling whenever they take the time to prove that to us on a continuous basis.

It’s a great intro to Clint Campbell. He’s the host of Truth From the Stand. He’s got a podcast and you’ve done a lot of things and we’re going to talk about his musical talents in his twenties and now what he’s doing over there in Pennsylvania and Ohio chasing whitetails. Clint, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Bruce. I appreciate you having me on. I’ve been following you for a while and I know you had my cohost from the podcast, Johnny “Utah” Mulligan on. I’m looking forward to chatting with you. and I appreciate you having me on and present me to your audience.

The podcast world is very interesting. It’s growing faster than I could have imagined because a lot of guys and gals are going into it. Share with us, the Truth From the Stand, why did you start it and what do you want to do with it?

The Truth From the Stand was one of those things where the long/short version is, I’m heading back to Pennsylvania from Florida and I think we’ll get into the musical piece, but I was there playing music for a bunch of years and moved back. While I was in Orlando, I didn’t have a whole lot of opportunity to hunt. While I was there, I took one trip to Alaska. When I got back here, I just dove in head over heels back into hunting. I grew up hunting since I was just a kid. Some of my earliest memories are my dad bringing game home, whether it’s Turkey, pheasant or whatever the case was. I got back here and I started getting back into hunting and jumped right into it with both feet. It was one of those things where I didn’t start bow hunting until I got to my thirties. I’m just one of those types of people that whenever I get into something, I just go all in. I’m an all or nothing guy. I started reading some books and some magazines and stuff like that. Leaning some stuff on my own. I had a good mentor who’s a friend of my father-in-law who showed me the way and got me started.

I started following Mark Kenyon of Wired to Hunt. I thought it was a really interesting perspective of sharing your missteps and stuff like that along the way. I thought sometimes some of the conversation that I was hearing or some of the articles and stuff that I was reading were geared for people who might have a little bit more experience than others. I was like, “I’m sure there are a lot of questions that I have that other people have that they are maybe afraid to ask somebody.” I’ve always been one of those guys where if you don’t ask, you’ll never know. I have a really high tolerance for failure. I have no problem just asking questions and trying to uncover the answers. I thought if I have certain types of questions, I’m sure there are other people out there that have it too. I was like, “Why don’t I create a platform where people can feel comfortable joining in and hearing people talk about deer hunting? I’ll ask questions that I have to help me get better as a hunter and hopefully at the same time, it’s helping people out there accomplish their goals as well.” Secondarily, I just like to talk about deer hunting. It was really the reason I started it. I live in an urban area too. Near the Philadelphia area, where I live now. I grew up in Central PA, which is really rural.

Where I live now, hunting is not a big thing. There’s not a ton of people around me that have hunting has an interest. There wasn’t like I had people that I can really connect with on a local level about hunting. Recently, I joined the archery club and I’ve met a lot more people who are into hunting since then. That was really the beginning of it. It was just one of those things where I thought it would be a cool idea, my music background let me be comfortable behind a microphone. The podcast seemed like a natural thing to do. As far as where it goes, who knows? I’m just having fun and Johnny “Utah” from the Arrow Wild Co. is now my cohost. We’re just having a good time bringing folks on talking about deer hunting. We’re hoping to try to bring some folks on who have different backgrounds that are absolutely passionate about the outdoors but maybe don’t work in the outdoors or maybe they have a different background, like they come from a music background who is passionate about hunting. We’re looking to bring on people like that and spreading the good word and making sure we’re good ambassadors for the outdoors.

What I think podcasts do to all of us in the hunting, in the outdoor segment of it, is that we help with recruitment. We need more kids to get involved in this. We need more kids to drop their technical devices and spend time in the outdoors. I think this is one way, dads or uncles and brothers, you should check this out. This is really rad or however kids talk now. To get them interested and I like it because they’re hearing stories. You and I, in the intro about elk hunting, we were sharing some stories about this happened and that happened and you said it, sitting around the campfire, it isn’t all the successes. It’s the arduous journey that you go on sometimes where you’re up against it or maybe really up against it and then it’s over and you’re behind and it’s behind you and then you’re healthy. You’re well.

You hit the nail on the head. It’s a big note to me as we’re talking about podcasts, is just making sure that the quality content of the outdoor industry is making its way into the social spaces and the places where young people are consuming content. I think that’s important. To add on to that is, with that there’s a heavy burden for those of us that put out the content to make sure that we’re putting it out in the right light. That we’re not giving ammo to those who are anti-hunting and making sure that we’re framing things the right way and providing the correct lens to the experience. We’re portraying ourselves the way we want to be portrayed and the way that we want to be viewed. I think that’s an important piece of it as well. I hope that I’m doing my part or at least I’m trying to. You’re right, hunting recruitment is a big thing. I was talking to a buddy of mine from K&A. For a long time, their focus has been let them go so they can grow. Their focus is now shifting a little bit. They’re still all about that management aspect of it, but it’s really about how do you fill the pipeline of the outdoor industry and hunting specifically with new and younger hunters.

They’ve done a bunch of studies that look at the average age of the whitetail hunter and how it’s increased year-over-year. At what point do people stop spending money in the outdoor industry once you hit a certain age? You have all the gear you’re ever going to want to have. I think on the whole, that’s one of the things that they’re concerned about. The retailers of the outdoor industry are taking notice of that too, and that there’s work to be done. My hope is that everyone recognizes that as an opportunity to reengage the young hunters and even engage those who are in their late twenties and early thirties who were driving a desk for living. They would love nothing more than to get out and hunt. They just don’t have any understanding of how to go out and do it. To take someone like that out and show them how to shoot a bow or how to shoot a deer, how to hunt or whatever it is. Just get them outside and join the outdoors, they’ll thank you for it and you’ll feel good about it.

One thing that warms my heart every time I go see the grandkids to get around, “Gramps, when are we going to the range?” I said, “Tell me your football schedules and we’ll get it worked out.” That’s a joy for me is that they have the desire to participate. They’ve heard plenty of stories and they know what I’ve done in the outdoor world and they’re just, “Tell me about this, tell me about that. How did that work out? What happened to those horses?” It’s the story. I guess that’s why I bring the stuff up because it’s the story that engages the kids and they go, “Wow.” That’s different than anything I’m living in. Those things really happened and you can go do that and you can travel and you climb those mountains or rap those rivers. It’s an adventure. Some people will never get that. I understand that. There are a lot of people, all they need to do is have somebody open that door to that adventure and who knows where they’re going to go?

There were a couple of neighbor kids I was talking to one day at the bus stop. I had my daughter at the bus stop and she actually goes to the range with me. She shoots a compound bow. She’s eight years old and she keeps asking me when she can go to Montana and hunt with me and when I’m going to take her to Ohio to hunt whitetail. She’s all geeked up on it and she wants to hopefully continue to do that. We’ll see how that bears out as she gets older but I just keep providing the opportunities to her. We go on some Turkey hunts together and squirrel hunts and stuff. I was talking to the kids at the bus stop. My daughter was asking me about something hunting-related and they said, “Do you hunt?” I said, “Yeah.” They had some video game on their phone they were playing. It was hunting-type of game or whatever. They thought when I said that I hunted, that I meant that I hunted on a video game. I said, “No.” I was like, “I go into the woods. I hike in. I get in a tree stand. I use a bow.” They’re like, “Do you shoot a bow?” I was like, “Yeah.” It blew their mind that you could actually go and do that. That was something that people get to do that didn’t just exist in a video game.

Everyone, talk to your neighbor’s kids, do whatever you’ve got to do. I’ve had Ace Luciano on who said, “Just one more.” That was his thing. Every fall he’d take out one more kid. He’d make a deal with himself every single year, he would go out and take one kid and introduce them to hunting. It didn’t matter what the game was, he would introduce them. I think we all need to embrace that because we are under attack.

It doesn’t take much to make an impression either. It’s one of those things where I’m friends with those kids’ parents. We’re bus stop parents together and we’d have them over for dinners. I knew that they weren’t big hunters are fans of hunting really. To be quite honest, we were talking one evening over dinner and I just started talking about hunting. I can tell it made them a little bit uneasy, but then they started asking questions about it. When I explained to them why I hunt and what it means to me and how much it is a part of the fabric of who I am, at the end of the dinner when they were getting ready to leave, I offered to them. I said, “I have a freezer full of venison.” They like to eat different types of things. They are very interested in different foods. I was like, “If you’re interested, you can have whatever you want from the freezer if you want to try venison. If you’ve never had it before.” They said, “That’d be great.” I shared it with them and then a couple weeks later, we met at the bus stop again and they said that they had tried it and it was awesome. They were like, “If you ever have any more that you’d want to share, we’d love to have it.” The hunting became okay to them because they saw that there was an output of it for me that I valued. That it was clean food for my family. It was the original organic. They had an appreciation for it. I don’t think that they’re ever going to hunt necessarily, but the fact now that they have an appreciation that hunting is okay and they understand why most people hunt is one of the reasons why you could or would. From that, I felt it was little star beside my name.

The fact now that they have an appreciation that hunting is okay and they understand why most people hunt is one of the reasons why you could or would Share on X.

That’s what it takes. You took the opportunity to say, “Do you want to try it?” They were over at your house and you built that relationship and what’s wrong with that?

You can’t be ashamed of who you are and where you come from and just be honest with people about why you do things. It’s okay to have a disagreement. Not everyone has to agree and that’s okay. I don’t know that I’d want to live in a place where everyone agreed, quite frankly. As long as you’re able to have reasonable conversation with one another and have an open mind and be open to different perspectives, then I think a lot can get done.

Let’s talk about your hunting tradition. You’ve mentioned that you basically grew up hunting in Pennsylvania. Let’s talk about how you were trained and taught. Was it your father or your grandfather?

Like a lot of folks growing up in PA, I’ve always said about Pennsylvania, it’s one of those things. They’ll never be mistaken necessarily for a big buck state. The caliber of deer and the hunting pressure here is pretty hefty in terms of the hunting pressure. The caliber of deer, you can go to some parts of the State where you can find really, really good deer, but on the whole, we’re probably more in line with Michigan and things of that nature, with the hunting pressure and the type of gear that you can run across. I grew up in a really rural area where hunting was what you did. When you were a kid growing up, there was no question whether or not you are going to hunt. It was just a matter of the time it took for you to be able to go get your permit and your license and stuff like that so you get out into the timber. I grew up on a farm. I was always out in the woods hunting with BB guns since I was able to hold one basically. My dad was the person who taught me how to hunt. He drilled into me more the ethics of hunting and the safety of hunting. That came first and foremost. I definitely have my dad to thank for my ethical approach to hunting. I don’t take a shot unless I know that I can make it.

I’d make sure I follow all my game laws and stuff like that and try to stay brushed up on those. That was just something he didn’t tolerate. His perspective was if you can’t do those small details right, then you don’t have enough responsibility or you’re not mature enough to take the life of an animal, which I thank him for. We did a lot of turkey hunting, pheasant hunting, rabbit hunting, deer hunting. He wasn’t a big archer. He did archery hunt a little bit. He shot a recurve mostly growing up. He still shot it from time–to-time. He switched over to a compound now. I’ve gotten him to do that just because he wants to do a couple of hunts with me going West. I suggested he try compound because I don’t think he spent enough time with his recurve to take that out. I think he would admit that too. He’s the guy who taught me how to hunt.

I was fortunate growing up that we always had a chunk of land that we use. My dad owned about 30 acres growing up, which is a small parcel by most standards. That’s where I grew up doing a lot of hunting and cutting my teeth and tracking deer, trying to figure out a little bit. The rifle season, it was obviously hard because we didn’t have a lot of land. We’re basically trying to catch them running. The area we grew up in was more of down area. My uncles were big hunters. My dad enjoys traveling to hunt as well. He’s been to Alaska. He took a bull in Colorado. He was out there a couple of years ago. That was really how I cut my teeth growing up was really the normal small games stuff and into whitetail hunting. It wasn’t ever a question whether or not I was going to do it. That was the moment when you start to really become a man in the area that I grew up is when you can start to do those types of things.

Thanks for that. It’s a rich heritage certainly that you do have. I know you don’t take that lightly.

Pennsylvania is definitely a heritage hunting state. That’s one thing. I’ve always said it, you wouldn’t be at a loss for most places to find someone to talk hunting with in the State of Pennsylvania, especially as you get in the central to the Western part of the state. Its people are bananas for it. All my cousins hunt, all my uncles hunt, for the most part. When we go to our family reunion, it’s funny because all the guys corner off together over the fourth of July. We all get together at my aunt’s place and it’s basically all the rest of the family on one side and then it’s basically me and my cousins hanging around the tailgate of one of my cousin’s truck with a cooler, having a couple of pots together and basically talking about deer hunting for about four hours until everyone calls it an evening.

You’re headed to Florida and you were in a band or you were the band? What was going on there?

Like I said, I grew up in a really small town and stuff and it was one of those things when I was a kid. Not really anybody in my family was musical. For whatever reason, I gravitated towards music for some reason. I don’t really know why. It’s one of those things. I equate it a lot to bow hunting. It’s one of those things that once it’s in your blood or in your bones, it’s never going to come out. It’s there forever. Growing up, I always knew that I wanted to be a musician to some degree and it worked out. I did the normal thing. I went through school and ended up going to college. I was a junior in college and it’s one of those things where I was like, “I don’t know what I want to do. All I want to do is be a musician. I’m not sure why I’m here. I want to play rock and roll.” I was like, “I’m going to move to Orlando,” because I went and checked it out and it seemed to have a decent music scene. I thought it was better to go there and try to be a big fish in a small pond first rather than going to New York or LA or Nashville or whatever. I headed to Orlando.

I remember I called my now wife, my girlfriend at the time. I basically just said, “I’m getting ready to move to Orlando to play music. You may or may not want to come and that’s okay, but I’m doing this. If so, then I’m leaving in two weeks.” She was like, “Let’s go.” She actually graduated in two weeks. After her graduation day, we hopped in a U-Haul and drove to Orlando. I started playing with a bunch of different people, trying to find my way. I hopped into one band that had a record deal. That didn’t work out. I got fired from my first professional gig, which wasn’t a great start. I was young and they thought they could take advantage of me, I guess a little bit. I stood my ground and got fired and then from there I was like, “I’ll just start my own band.”

I started working in a recording studio that a buddy of mine owned and I started just writing demos or doing all the demo and stuff on my own and started slowly but surely piecing a band together around it. Then lo and behold, we had some good fortune and got a record deal and you’ve got to make a record. I had the whole experience. I’ve got a record deal and got dropped and got picked up by another record company and got to have a bunch of really cool experiences. I played a bunch of great shows. I made a bunch of great friends and that was what happened with music. I just got to a point to where it turned into a job and I wasn’t so sure that I wanted something that I cared that deeply about to become something I was going to end up disliking because it was going to become my 9 to 5. I ended up leaving the band right after we got back from LA recording at one point. I went back to school and finished my degree. My wife and I decided to move back to Pennsylvania to be closer to family and raising our daughter in Pennsylvania.

We fell in love with hunting, not that it ever left me. I had to take a hiatus while I was doing music because it’s super time-consuming between studio and playing live and stuff like that. I picked up the bow and started bow hunting. There are a lot of parallels in my mind between bow hunting and music. One of them as a person who was a songwriter for a period of time, there are a lot of highs and lows with songwriting where there are some days where songs just fall out of the sky and fall into your lap. There are other times where you might have written a chorus a year ago and now all of a sudden, a year later, you wrote a verse and that works with that chorus and now you have a song. That chorus has haunted you for a year it seems like. To me hunting, is the same way. There are certain hunts that you just put all the work in the world and it just does not come together. You might have to work on patterning a buck for two, three years or whatever until you finally figured enough of the puzzle pieces out to really put a good hunt on him.

There are days, like I had in Ohio where I did a bunch of summer scouting. I went to a new state that I’ve never been to and I did a day scout on a big piece of public land. I went and did three sits. I killed a great Pope and Young public-land deer in Ohio on three sits. It’s just fell into place. You experienced those dramatic highs and those dramatic lows, but there’s always this underlying passion and love for it that continues to bring you back and that you just can’t get enough of it.

Being a musician and a hunter, it folds together.

I think the biggest show I ever played was the Serena gig and it was 3,000 to 5,000 arena or whatever. I don’t know exactly how big the arena was, but it was a big place. That was one of the biggest shows I’ve ever played. The rush you get from that type of crowd, the only equivalent I’d ever had to that has been sitting on stand and watching the buck that I’m about to release my arrow at, approach my stand. Those were the only two things that I’d ever had to come close to that type of adrenaline. I’ve never went skydiving, that might be up there, but for me, I get the same feelings. It evokes the same emotions. If I wrote a really powerful song, there’s been times where I wrote a song or I wrote a chord progression or whatever in a lyric that would potentially bring a tear to my own eye after writing it, I’ve had those same experiences on the stand. I’m not ashamed to admit it. It’s like I’ve been moved in the timber the same way from a hunting experience. To me, that reinforces that I’m still connected to the outdoors and to nature in a real meaningful way that it’s able to move me like that, emotionally. For me, when that’s gone, then I think you should hang up the bow, hang up the guitar, hang up whatever it is that you’re dealing.

Music does drive our emotions. People have made a gazillion dollars by getting to people’s emotion and then they just embrace that song because it means something to them. It’s the same thing, everyone, when you’re on that tree stand, Mr. Wonderful’s coming up and you know an opportunity is going to present itself to take that deer. It gets exciting. If you don’t get excited when that happens, just get out of the woods. Go fly fishing or catch walleyes or shoot ducks. That’s the thing I’ve always said to my grandkids. They said, “How come you hunt so hard? How come you do it?” “It’s because I love it.” Since I was ten years old, I loved it. Throw it all together and talking to you about how you created things, I think creativity enters into the hunting realm. Let’s talk about that Ohio three-sit Pope and Young down. How did you do that? You’re sitting in Pennsylvania, tell us how many miles and tell us how you found the public land and how you decided where you put your stands. Take it apart and let’s hear about it.

One of the things that I don’t like to hear people say is that, “I can’t kill a deer like that. There’s not any deer like that around where I live.” “That’s fine. Go find them.” It’s like, “Do you have the opportunity to hunt public lands?” One of the great things about this country is that we have public lands to go to hunt. Access for you is there if you’re willing to put in a little bit of work for it. I was sitting in PA. I had an expectation of the type of hunting I wanted to do and the type of deer that I wanted to hunt. I narrowed it down to, “How far am I willing to travel for that?” For me, being in PA, I was looking at Ohio being the closest place to try to get me into the caliber of deer and the caliber of experience that I wanted to have. I knew Ohio is probably the place that I wanted to go. I started going online and started just researching different counties that had good statistics as far as good bucks taken and stuff like that.

Some of other counties have popped to the top of the list or places like Muskingum County and Coshocton and stuff like that. I penciled in an area that I was like, “These are the counties I want to go after.” I started looking at what type of public land access do I have in these certain counties. That was the counties I was looking at. I narrowed it down to, “It’s going to be this county.” I went and found some online maps of those pieces of public land that I had narrowed it down to because I was wanting to see how much camp is on them, how many horse trails are on them. Are they using them for BXM-style bike riding or mountain biking or hiking or whatever? I wanted to go to an area that was going to have as little of that as possible because I want to get away from people and I wanted to get away from disturbances.

I found that area that I wanted that I thought would be a good place. It was a reasonable driving distance from my home. I then went starting to look on Google Earth and using Google Earth and onXmaps and stuff like that. Just start to really dive into looking at the topography of the land that I potentially wanted to hunt. Trying to find places that I thought were going to be good places just by land features to check out. I was looking at places that are maybe away from agricultural fields. Places that looked like it might be hard access. I dropped some way points in those areas. I think I might’ve had seven whenever I went out there. I told myself when I went out there, this will help me streamline the amount of time I’m to spend trying to hunt for a spot, so I’ll go to these places. I had criteria that was basically like if I walk in and was relatively quickly find either the bucks sign that I’m looking for or if I immediately start to see a sign of other hunters, then I’m out of there. That’s an important mission moment.

I hopped in the truck. I drove seven hours to Ohio. I put boots on the ground for a day and hunted and hiked, scouted all those spaces. It’s the hottest day of the year. Anytime I go to scout somewhere during the summer months and I worked up a pretty good sweat. From sun up to sun down, I think I pulled out from my hometown. I drove partway back in my hometown. I got there at around 7:30, 7:00 in the morning in Ohio. I scouted until 8:00 or 8:30, whatever it was before it got dark to be in the woods. I ended up finding a couple of spots that piques my interest. One spot was really interesting. It was on a river bottom. The opposite side of the river of course was just ridiculously steep ridge. When we got to the bottom of that ridge, it was just thick and nasty and it was a completely vertical shot to get to the top of it. I started hiking it and I found a couple of deer trails, but nothing too crazy.

One of the great things about this country is that we have public lands to go to hunt. Share on X

If anyone had hiked it instead of walking up in there, you basically have to machete your way through greenbrier and just nastiness. I knew no one was really going to probably walk up through there because it didn’t present as an area that looked like it had high deer density. I put my time in and I’ve got about three-quarters of the way up and I found the sign that I was looking for. I found some old rugs that were telling me that that deer we’re using that area. I found some from the previous year, which was great. I went down the back side of that ridge and things were just completely ripped up from the previous year. I knew that that’s probably where I wanted to be. That and the fact that I had to climb over a bunch of deadfall and machete my way through a bunch of greenbrier and just got all cut up from the briers and stuff like that. I knew no one was going to make that hike to that spot, especially with a stand on their back.

I ended up in my spot. I found a decent tree to climb and marked the GPS spot. I went back in November. I literally walked in the first day and my GPS died as I got part of the way into timber. I’m in there and it was one of the only times I’ve ever been in the words. I’ve hunted in Alaska before and I had some interesting experiences there. It was probably the only time that I was in the timber, in an unfamiliar place that my GPS died and I actually had a moment of like, “I’m not quite sure how I get out of here.” There was no cell service there. It wasn’t like I could call anybody. I literally had a moment where I had to sit down for a second and be like, “This is how people die in the woods when they just keep walking in circles. Stop and figure out where you’re going.” I need to try to make a game plan. I ended up getting my stuff together and I made it back to where I thought I needed to be and found a different tree that I actually preferred to climb at that point.

I’ve got everything set up and I ended up being about three quarters of the way up this ridge top, after I did a bunch of meandering around the woods. It was a classic dead-end fault where I was three quarters the way up this ridge top on the side of the ridge where it’s like the thermals were really going to work for me especially in the morning. I think the way I was positioned, I don’t know what it was, but I was bulletproof in that stand day after day after day. I typically don’t hunt the same stand over and over again. As long as I don’t get seen going in, heard or winded while I’m in that sit, I feel pretty good about hunting at multiple days. That ended the first evening. I had some good deer movement. I had a couple of right under my stand. It had no clue I was there. I went back the second day. I hunted an all-day sit that day. I had some decent deer movement and then I had a nice shooter that was dogging that doe that comes through.

He’s interested in her, of course. He came in ripping up a bunch of trees, putting on a show for me, grunting and carrying on. She came within 30 yards of me through one of the only shooting window I had. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me. This is like magic.” I was like, “He’s going to follow her on a string, walk right in front of that window and give me a broadside shot at 30 yards. I can’t believe it.” Right before he got through that window, he ducked down into a bunch of fixed stuff below me. He got a little bit out of eyesight. I grunted at him. He ripped up a tree down there and he’s carrying on and then he just went silent. You would’ve swore he just laid down there.

I sat there for probably ten or fifteen minutes and I just assumed he probably kept on that doe and kept going. Everything I had seen to that point was responding to grunts at that point. I thought I’ll throw out a grunt and see if I can change his mind. See if maybe I can convince him there’s someone on his turf that wants to pick a fight for his lady friend. I grunted, nothing. I turned to my left and there he was standing. He already snuck back and J-hooked around me. I know better too. I just didn’t check my surroundings before I grunted to see if there was any deer around me. He spotted me and took off and that was it.

Usually, I wouldn’t sit that same sit again but I just had so much stink and deer movement and rut activity there that I was like, “I’m going to try it one more day.” If I don’t see a deer, then I know that I blow up my spot that’s it. I was going to be on Ohio for about ten days. I had some days. I got in to the sit the next day. I sat all day. I had one buck that showed up every day about 8:30. I saw him for a little bit, a couple of does and then it got real quiet. No activity in mid-day. I ate lunch. I usually never blind grunt. Every deer that I’ve seen or buck that had grunted and I grunted back came running to my tree stand. Everything I had seen had been really aggressive. I was like, “I’m going to throw out a blind grunt at about 1:30 and just see if something responds. I was like, “The rest of the day is dead then I’ll move to a different spot tomorrow.” I throw out a blind grunt and as soon as I grunted I heard something jump up on the other side of the strange cut that was to my left. He was bedded down to me really close, because between the time I grunted and then I released my arrow was about a total of 30 seconds. He came to about 23 yards, quartering pretty hard toward me.

I hit the range probably two to three days a week and shoot a good bit. I’m a decent shot. I don’t know if I had enough time to sit that shot up. If I would have made the shot that I made because I slipped it right behind his front shoulder and he ran all downhill, which was good because that was actually the way out, was downhill and pound up at about 80 yards or whatever. He’s a ten-point. He scored 125 to 130 inches. I scored him while I was out there. I was so excited that I forgot to measure his brow tines, which was a stupid mistake. He is somewhere between 125 and 130 inches. It was a great buck. I was super stoked to have him. I put my buddy that I was with in my same stand two days later and he caught a great eight-point out at the same stand. That was a hotspot.

You said you grunted, how loud was the grunt?

It was just like a little grunt with a little attending grunt on the back of it. That was about it. That was all it took. He was on it like no one’s business. That was pretty much the story for the whole time that I was in that tree stand. I can throw out a grunt. There was a little five-point. I hope he makes in two years because in two years, I’ll go back and hunt him. It looked like he had baseball bats at the top of his head. He has the weirdest looking rack that I had seen. It looked like he had two little Louisville sluggers for main beams on the top of his head. The rest of it is rack wasn’t impressive, but he was ridiculously tall and the mass that he had for as young of a deer as he was ridiculous. He must’ve been bedded close by because anytime I would hear him grunt, I respond back. It doesn’t sound like he was working to me and he would come running on sprints, slobber and shaking his head all puffed up, and bristled out looking like he’s ready to tussle with somebody. I think I sat four days and I saw six or seven bucks. Of those, two were definitely no doubt shooters. The one that I blew the chance on and another one that I killed. Then there was another one that slipped in behind me that I think he was a shooter, but there was a lot of stuff between him and I so I couldn’t tell for sure. I was covered up in bucks that whole trip.

The on you did call in, was he 50 yards from your stand or 60 or 100? How far away do you think he was?

I couldn’t see where he’s was from because that drainage cut to my left was just full of brier. You couldn’t see across it. The amount of time that it took for him to get from where he was bedded to me, he couldn’t have been any further than maybe 30 yards, I would say from the spot that I shot him at. From my tree stand, he probably would have been 50 yards, but from the spot that I shot and released my arrow, is maybe 30 yards from him.

Everyone, the reason I bring that up, Clint, he got into someplace that probably nobody on the planet Earth has hunted, at least anybody in Chicago has hunted, two, he gets set up in the right way. I liked how he said about the wind and how it would be in his favor the whole time. He did enough grunting, he took inventory and to sit in the stand all day is a lot of work, but he did it and he made it. You take those things away and you go back to the beginning, I’m going to hunt Ohio. Where am I going to hunt? How am I going to hunt? I’m going to hunt here, with Google Earth and onXmaps, you can see places that you need to check out which you did. You went Rambo style and crawling up a ridgeline. That’s what it takes.

I can go back and hunt in that spot this year and maybe not see any deer. That’s the breaks. More times than not, some folks will say that was a really lucky hunt. I’m like, “Luck is opportunity meets preparation.” I did a lot of preparation leading up to that. I was scouting maps and putting boots on the ground. I spent hours looking at maps, just whittling down the places that I wanted to go look at. It was time well-spent. I think if anybody does that, you’ll be rewarded. The key to it too is, I know a lot of folks and I’m guilty of this too, especially if I’m hunting in private ground or at our family farms and stuff like that, and I got into a habit of doing morning and evening hunts. At a lot of times go and get out of the woods in mid-day. I had never done that until I started bowhunting. That’s just something I never did. I was always an all-day hunter until I started bowhunting. This trip changed my outlook on it to where I’m back in the old days. Especially that time of year when you get to that late October, November time, you just don’t know what’s going to happen when. I think back now how many times I have got out of stand and had a shooter walk by while I was eating a sandwich or eating soup. I’m an advocate now of all day sits, especially once you get to the second half of October on.

I start all-day sits on Halloween just because it’s Halloween. A lot of guys kill a lot of big bucks on Halloween. You run the course. Is it to the seventh, to the tenth? You just have to figure out the breeding season and when they’re chasing and seeking in all those types of things and figuring that out for you and your stand and then have a couple of stands and I rotate my scent. I typically have three stands if not four and then I’ll just rotate them. I don’t like to sit the same stand more than three days in a row. What does Steve say about that?

What he has said in the past was that basically, if you’re not getting blown up, a lot of people give up on a stand way too early where they can only hunt it once and then that spot is a dead spot for a week, two weeks or whatever you subscribed to as far as your standard rotation philosophy is. What he basically says is that if you’re not being seen, your scent control on point and you’re not being heard entering and exiting and you have really great access. That’s the key to it. It’s like you have great in and out access. You can hunt that stand multiple times. If you have long camera for example, you have a private parcel and you have a great shooter that come in by this bean field or a cornfield or clover field or whatever it is. He’s using this little pinch point between his bedding and that field to get there and you had him coming by there every evening at 6:30 or whatever or 5:00 or 4:30, whatever time of year it is with enough daylight left and you hunted one day and say you get a sighting of him, but it after dark.

It’s like if he didn’t see the does, if there are other deer that didn’t see you, it didn’t look like they winded or weren’t are spooked at all and you have great access in and out and you’re not bumping deer to and from your stand, then there’s no reason if the wind conditions and the conditions are correct that he shouldn’t use that same pinch point. You should absolutely be back in that stand the next day if the weather factors and everything line up and the wind lines up for you. I don’t think anyone would recommend getting into a stand on a bad wind day. It’s just absolutely not on your favor. If you do have the same favorable conditions, you absolutely should make a second hunt at it and a third if need be. There is a point of diminishing returns. I don’t recall exactly what he said about that. I would throw three sits at it. I did that in Ohio, it was three sits and I was still in good shape.

You had a lot of different things going for it because like I said, nobody’s hunted there. Those deer had probably never seen anybody on that ridge. Just with the description.

It was the most relaxed deer that I think I had ever seen coming from Pennsylvania where they literally will look up a tree and spot you even though you haven’t made a sound. It seems like they are trained at birth to look up trees. That was something that was definitely different. The most relaxed I’ve ever seen deer before.

You should absolutely be back in that stand the next day if the weather factors and everything line up and the wind lines up for you. Share on X

We’ve got to call it a show Mr. Clint Campbell from the Truth From the Stand Podcast. This has been amazing. I can’t wait to see the photos from your journey out West and hear some stories. We’ll have to connect again. I’d love to hear those stories.

I’d love to come back on and share those with you. I’m sure I’ll be posting some of those whether on Instagram or Facebook or on the side or whatever. I’m sure I’ll be sharing some of those stories as we go along.

On behalf of everyone across North America, Clint Campbell, it’s been just a pleasure.

I look forward to doing it again, Bruce. I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate everyone taking the time to indulge me with listening to me talk about one thing that I absolutely love, which is all things deer hunting and the novice that I am at elk hunting at this point. I hope to climb the ranks on that as well.

Take care.

We’re heading down to Texas. We’re going to connect with a good friend of mine from Columbus, Texas, Herman Brune. Herman’s a prolific writer for the Texas Fish & Game Magazine. He’s also the Vice President of Texas Sportsmen Association. He’s been a guide and a hunter. He did a lot of hunting up in Wyoming, and all round a true to earth cowboy of the highest order, Mr. Herman Brune.

Important Links:

• Truth From the Stand
• Johnny “Utah” Mulligan – previous episode
• Wired to Hunt
• Arrow Wild Co.
• K&A
• Ace Luciano – previous episode
• onXmaps
• Truth From the Stand on Instagram
• Truth From the Stand on Facebook
• Texas Fish & Game Magazine
• Texas Sportsmen Association