For eleven months a mature mule deer is a ghost. Then November comes and the rut hands you the one chance the rest of the year denies.
By Elk Glade Editorial3 min read
You can hunt a big mule deer buck all October and never know he's there.
That's not a figure of speech. A mature muley survives by being invisible — bedded in the steep, brushy pockets by day, moving only in the dark, watching his backtrail from places you can't approach. The bucks that get old get old by being uncatchable. Then the calendar turns to November and the whole thing comes undone.
The mule deer rut peaks in November, a month or two behind the elk. When it hits, a buck that was a rumor in October chases a doe into the open at noon, walks past danger he'd never approach a month earlier, and generally hands a hunter the one mistake he doesn't make the rest of the year. Cold weather pours gas on it. A front during the rut can turn a dead-quiet morning into the best day of the season.
That's the window, and it's a narrow one. We've written out how it works — pre-rut, peak, and the second wave — on the mule deer rut reference, and the tag-and-tactics side of it on the Colorado mule deer hunting guide. The catch in Colorado is that every deer tag is draw-only, so the late-season tags that overlap the rut are the prized ones.
Eleven months of ghost. One month of daylight. Plan around the one.
