Photo by Ron Sinfelt

The Pisgah National Forest stretches from the western edge of Watauga County in the northwestern corner of North Carolina all the way past I-26 to the west and almost to the South Carolina line, including land in 10 different counties.

Deer concentrations won't knock your eyes out, because there aren't nearly as many whitetails as there are along the Coastal Plain and in the river bottoms of the Piedmont, but there are surely more than in the extreme western end of the state.

So that adds up to half a million acres of public-hunting land with some decent deer hunting.

The question facing many Tar Heel State hunters is how to find those little hotspots where there is a chance at filling a deer tag, perhaps with a bragging-sized buck.

Robert Potts of Yadkin Valley Outfitters has hunted the Pisgah National Forest for years, and he offers semi-guided hunts for deer in areas he has discovered through trial and error.

He said that the national forest has a big enough deer population so that hunters have a reasonably good chance to score, but perhaps the biggest plus is that lowered hunting pressure is allowing bucks to put on some age and antlers.

"There are some monster deer up there," Potts said. "There aren't as many big numbers of deer, but they can get big.

"The herd is not overpopulated by any means, but there are certain places that have enough food and the right amount of cover, so there's a good chance the older deer in the herd will be real nice. The 4 1/2- and 5 1/2-year-old bucks will have massive horns and long tines."

Potts said it is his experience that deer numbers are fairly stable across the national forest. Finding them doesn't take a genius or a seasoned old mountain man -- just knowledge of deer and their habits.

"They're the same everywhere you go. They need food, water and bedding areas," Potts said (336/624-2120). "In a national forest, the majority of what they eat is going to be browse and mast, but if you can find any fields, those areas will be good. Most of them will be on (neighboring) private land, but the wildlife commission is doing a lot of habitat manipulation up there."

Actually, biologist Don Hayes of State Road, who up until a few years ago worked on habitat improvement on the national forest and other public lands, said that the U.S. Forest Service isn't doing as much timber cutting as it used to.

"We need timber harvests to keep a good deer population going," Hayes said, "and over the past few years, that has been dwindling. All of the timber sales on U.S. Forest Service land have to go up for public comment, and without fail, any sale is opposed. And the USFS winds up not doing anything."

Hayes said that the "early successional" covers that result after any timber harvest aren't showing up every year, but that the USFS has available for interested hunters localized maps that show where timber has been cut and where suitable cutovers may be developing.

"You can go to Asheville and find maps (at the Pisgah National Forest headquarters) and locate that critical habitat," he said.