Treestands -- A survivor looks back

Something occurred to me this summer as I was getting ready for the start of deer season. I was in the shed, moving unused stands around, and it hit me how far removed from my earlier hunting experiences I had become. I’m now 48. I’m now well into my 20-something-th year going after deer. What has changed?

The biggest change is my choice of treestands. My first few stands were home-brew jobs. The first was an ill-conceived bit of wrong-headedness based on the assumption that a nice piece of marine plywood could be hung on a tree with a piece of chain and not a whole lot of thought had to go into it. The second was a kit-built climber that got left in the forest after a pre-dawn ride down twenty feet of maple. This was all tried after a couple of seasons that had me thinking I could just climb a tree and sit on a limb and shoot deer with a bow. Yes, you can do that, but it quickly left me looking for easier, safer ways to enjoy my hobby

There’s a lot missing from those days—bruises mostly. I never had a real honest-to-goodness fall, but I had a lot of extremely rapid decents. Along the way I learned a lot of things:

1) Stay out of other people’s abandoned stands. They are abandoned for a reason.
2) Stay out of dead trees. One white-knuckle afternoon in a 20 mph wind will convince me.
3) Use store-bought stands.
4) Do not exceed the weight rating of a treestand. Figure in at least a 20% margin for your gear plus an extra margin for wear and tear.

If you had asked me half-way through my career as a treestand maven, I would have pointed you to a sturdy self-climber like the Summit Viper or the API Grand Slam Super Magnum. For a guy who could not trust that his stand was going to be there from week to week, a climber made sense. The weight was always a problem. Finding the right tree was always a problem. The bulk was always a problem. The noise of getting set up and climbing was always a problem. Still, it was a fairly luxurious time once I was up there. For a guy who used to climb up the nearest pine tree and lash himself to the trunk, this was heaven.

The biggest revolution in my career as a treestand survivor came when I started choosing ladder stands over the others. My weight had exceeded the limit on several of my older stands, and I had recently acquired land that allowed me to put permanent stands up. I immediately went trolling through the discount stores for last-year’s closeouts and scored several simple ladders, a buddy style ladder, and a cheap chain-on that I figured I could use with my existing climbing stick. I already have several climbers, a lightweight strap-on, and oodles of strap-on and screw in steps.

By the end of the first season under the new regime I counted bruises and deer and realized that a 15 foot ladder stand had won hands down.

1) I had one near miss on a deer out of one climber that I’d had to lug clear back to a tree and use to climb up into the nosebleed range. I had zilch out of the others, including the ones that I had left in the trees from week to week.
2) I had put up a couple chain-on platforms out in some good areas. Nada.
3) I had some short (10-foot) ladders out. Zip.
4) I had two deer from the 15 foot Buddy Stand.

As the years have progressed, I have gradually migrated away from my other options and gone with a moderate-height ladder stand for all of my primary hunting venues. The disposition of the remainder:

1) My API Grand Slam Super Magnum climber has been in mothballs since 2003, but largely unused since 2001. I keep telling myself that if a unique situation arises, I can deploy a climber to the right tree on a moment’s notice. The more I scout, the less that becomes an issue.
2) My lightweight API strap-on is mothballed. I just do not need a lightweight stand to carry in on my back anymore.
3) The low-altitude ladders are out there, but I get busted too often to make them anything more than a secondary choice.
4) When I want to explore a new venue, I’m using a climbing stick and a sturdy Hunter’s View chain-on. I used this combination successfully in 2003, and replaced it with a buddy-style ladder stand the next summer so I could hunt with my kids.

What really got me making this fearless assessment occurred a few days after my clean-out in the shed. I had brought out the climbing stick to help me install a new buddy stand. I was dressing for work midweek and noticed a myriad of bruises that had popped up all over my legs and arms. In the years before my switch to ladder stands, I had stopped noticing the punishment I gave myself every season. I looked like I’d been back playing football, instead of having a nice quiet afternoon erecting a new stand. The trips up and down the climbing stick, and the various acts of climbing up, reaching around, and hanging out had left a mark. I didn’t mind the bruises, but it reminded me of how far I had come.

My conclusions after all this time and all this investment in stands—money, bruises, and the occasional cold-sweat in the middle of the night are as follows:

1) If you have any chance of putting up a stand for the season, the moderate-height ladder stands are the way to go. The deer do not mind the ladder and if my boots are up 15 feet, and the rest of me is behind a waist-high camo blind, they ain’t gonna know until its too late. Before I sunk $300 into another system, I’d risk losing a stand to robbers and spring for three $100 dollar ladders. I was also a nosebleed cowboy for a few years. I’m now hunting at half my old favorite height, and I see and shoot more deer.
2) I’ve got a bunch of deer to show you that climbers work, but I wonder how many big bucks I honked off over the years that heard me climbing in the darkness and decided to take the road less traveled. Ladder stands are absolutely the quietest way for a deer hunter to get airborne.
3) My collection of screw-in and strap-on steps is gradually being converted to gear-hangers on my buddy stands. The older they get (and the older I get), the less I trust them.
4) If bruises were my sole reason for picking a stand, climbing sticks and screw in steps would win. If I was looking for the shear thrill of riding a treestand to the ground, I have a couple retired climbers in the attic I could break out. If I’m solely thinking about a stand that ceases to be an issue after it’s up: a ladder.