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Vermonters Head South |
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Vermonters Head South By Jimmy Paige The Vermont Sportsman July 1996It was late January of '96, as we finished loading all our assorted gear into the rented van and pulled out of the driveway. Myself, good friend Forrest Bartlett and his son Tom were heading south. This hunt had been planned almost a year in advance and it was to be my very first "southern" deer hunt. It was a full twenty-four hours of driving, through first rain, then sleet and snow, before we reached our destination in southwestern Alabama. We pulled into the gravel road that led to the camp and lodge about noon on Sunday, with a light rain falling. This was Bojie Beer's Alabama River Lodge, located in rural Sardis, Alabama. Huge fields stretched out in all directions, with treelines here and there; most of the land bordering huge swamps or red pine thickets. |
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The Happy New Year Buck |
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The Happy New Year Buck by Tim Jonas My first trip to the Alabama River Lodge was the last week in January 1997. Although I harvested two does and one small buck there, I had not had the opportunity to take a trophy buck in 1997 at the lodge. I visited the Alabama River Lodge with my friends and hunting partners, Bub and Mark Mitchell of Charlotte, NC. Both harvested a trophy buck during our stay at the lodge in 1997. What a thrilling experience it was to hunt some of Alabama's prime hunting grounds and I looked forward to the next visit all year. One could not ask for a better facility, food, or Southern hospitality than that displayed by the Alabama River Lodge. |
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Barely Scrapin' By |
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Barely Scrapin' By by 'Mark Mitchell'
Little was I to know that second year at the Alabama River Lodge would be more memorable than my first! Hunting at the lodge is a true pleasure for an avid deer hunter like myself. I hunt probably 50 days a year back home in North Carolina.
I was lucky enough to harvest a nice 8 point buck with a very high symmetrical rack on the last day of the hunt in 1995. That first year I hunted a different stand each day out, but the next year I knew where I wanted to hunt. I told Bojie Beers that I wanted to hunt a clearcut where he had put me one morning the previous year. Bojie put me in a permanent ladder stand overlooking a 4 year old pine field. That morning I saw a nice 6 point buck in the rain around 7:30 AM. About 10 AM I got down to do a little scouting.
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Two-fer Bucks |
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Two-fer Bucks
by Rich Crossman  We left my home town of Winthrop, Massachusetts, a small suburb about 2 miles from Boston. The van was packed to the roof with more hunting equipment than Cabela's has in its fall catalog, not including the pillows, blankets and coolers for the anticipated venison, and a few yummy Scoobie Snacks for the ride. Then shove in five extremely hyper and excited hunters into a van stuffed tighter than a Martha Stewart turkey and you're looking at one incredible sight. Although the van was intricately stacked, pulling on the wrong bag could lead to an avalanche of epic proportions. I kissed my wife Debbie good-bye and somehow slithered into the van, pulled my blanket over my head and attempted to get some sleep before it was my turn to drive. |
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The Hartenstein Buck |
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It was Friday, January 12, 1996. My watch read 10:30 p.m., and the thermometer was hovering near single digits as the wind gusts topped out at 30 mph. I struggled to keep control of my snow thrower as I built a wall of 12-foot-high powder around my driveway. Mists of snow blanketed my face, and I felt like an icicle was growing from the tip of my nose. In a few hours, I had hoped to be leaving on a trip to Alabama for my first ever mid-winter southern whitetail hunt, and I was feverishly struggling to dig out from the second blizzard to hit my home town of New Freedom, Pennsylvania, during the last week. If I couldn't do it in time to get a good night's rest, I would have to delay, or even cancel, my trip. Well, I finished moving all the snow a little before midnight, and made it to Alabama on schedule. I also shot the biggest buck of my life.
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