Getting Ready for Deer Hunting

Yes, we deer hunt!  It's a much anticipated time of year for us.  We usually have a house full of people and there are cammo clothes draped all over the furniture and rifles and bows all over the place.  We gather around pots of homemade spaghetti and chili and plates of spicy nachos.  It's usually cool enough to have a fire roaring in the fireplace in the evenings and we roast hot dogs and marshmallows late into the night.  It's warm and cozy in the house and cold and crisp outside in the mornings when we head out.  There is always excitement in the air.

My husband was raised deer hunting and we take our kids every year.  Kentucky is heavily populated with deer.  We take every deer we get, have it processed, and eat it.  Deer sausage is excellent and my favorite thing!  It's like summer sausage and I love it on crackers with cream cheese and hot pepper jelly.  Yum!  I also love the tenderloins, which we fry.  I'll leave that for another post.

We had Chablis and my nephew, Kyle, along for help.... 

My step son, Lou Jr., his wife Nicki and their daughter Alyssa also came along.  We really needed everyone's help this year!

Anyway, we drove out to the property that we rent for hunting to get our deer stands ready for this season.  The heavy rains this year made the grass and weeds explode to jungle proportions.  This is the road leading down to our stands....

Louie, Chablis and Kyle walked the road, clipping wayward branches and picking up logs and sticks that were in the way....

I drove the Gator and pointed out whatever they missed!   :-)

We didn't have too much cleanup to do around Louie's stand.  I had the perfect bird's eye view of the lay of the land tho!

We continued further down the main path and that's when things started to get really bad.....

Apparently a bad storm had blown through at some point during the year and downed a bunch of trees, right across the path.  There is absolutely no way to go around them, so we had to work our way through them.  It's a good thing we thought to bring the chain saws along.  It took us about an hour to work through the first set of trees and move the logs out of the way.  We thought we were free and clear.....

Silly us!  A little further down the path we came upon a set of 4 huge, downed trees, all laying right across our path.  The first group wasn't too bad.  If you look down the path you can see the huge trees laying there...

Each tree got progressively larger......

And larger......

Thank goodness we had the gator!  We were able to tie ropes to the cut tree trunks and drag them out of the way.  Backing up with the Gator, somebody accidentally (not ME, but I'm not saying who) took out our cooler with all our drinks and sandwiches.....

Then one of the saws kept breaking down.  We'd get it started and the minute Louie touched it to a tree, it would die out.  Jr. and Chablis about fell over, they were laughing so hard!

2 solid days of work got most of the path finally cleared.  The property owner is going to brush hog the path for us and in a couple of weeks we should be ready for our first hunt of the year!