2024 was a pretty memorable year. Every hunting season has peaks and valleys, and this one was no exception, but it seemed to have many more peaks than other years.
I typically look forward to the hunting season starting with turkey in the spring, but this year, I had a pretty special trip to start things off: Jason Matzinger and I went to Patagonia to hunt Red Stag. We had been following a friend of ours who guides in Patagonia and the quality of free-range stags they were taking. We had hunted with Joaquin in 2017 and stayed in touch through the years. When he told us about the beauty of the area, the low hunting pressure and the quality of the stags, we had to go.
It’s not often a hunt exceeds expectations, but this one did. Everything about where we were in Patagonia was amazing: The people, weather, landscape and quality of stags was second to none and Jason and I got to share it together. We both were able to take great, mature stags and Jason was able to also take a management stag.
My turkey season started a month after Patagonia with my first time hunting Iowa with Tom Petry. We hunted with our friends in Iowa and Tom and I were able to take toms, but so did our friend as well as his young daughter, who killed her first turkey with a .410.
I decided this year that I wasn’t going to travel to hunt in September and October, but elk and focus on my home state for elk and pronghorn. That focus paid off with my second-best bull and my first pronghorn archery buck. I was also able to fill a cow tag in September with my bow.
Archery is my biggest passion but coming in second place is whitetail. I took two and a half weeks in November and made a road trip to Kansas and Oklahoma. Nick Ventura, Rob Shaw and I subleased a couple of farms in Kansas from an outfitter and had a good hunt. We had some good, mature bucks on trail camera and hunted hard for 7 days, but didn’t end up taking a buck. I did have a mature deer on my first sit, 5 minutes into the hunt, but he had a broken tine, and I figured I would have more opportunities. It was a good time with good friends, and we spent a week in Kansas during the rut.
I then drove to Oklahoma to hunt with Tom Petry on our mutual friend, Mike Stone’s family property. I did kill a hog, a first with my bow and finally took a nice 8 point on the last evening of my hunt.
Although it was 2025, I still consider it part of the 2024 hunting season, I returned to Oklahoma in mid-January to hunt with Mike again and help shoot some does. Unfortunately, Mother Nature didn’t play fair and dumped 12 inches of snow on us. I was able to shoot two does in one sit, but other than that we didn’t do much to help manage the does for them.
Most of these hunts were filmed, with the exception of Montana. Keep an eye out on the website for them, they will be out before the end of April 2025.
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