Friends and I are going out there for the first time.

Any recommendations or thoughts?

nobody has lived to tell about it.....

East Texas shoots at anything moving. Be careful and you can't wear enough orange

I own property that is technically in the eastern part of it. There's a mishmash of public and private land, which is why it looks like a half complete jigsaw puzzle on maps.

It's east tx piney woods. If you can find a place where the deer are moving, you might find one. I have to tell you I drove though there on the way to the LSU game along 1375, and there were quite a few trucks parked roadside. They were probably scouting. It is illegal to bait or set up permanent fixtures in the forest, so lots of scouting is needed to find the deer.

I've hunted it. Gets pretty crowded in there. Have to go a long way to get away from folks

Hunted it during rifle season last year, plan on going again this year. Very fun hunting. Had a great time even though I wasn't successful in harvesting anything. The guys I was with each shot a spike.

Scouting is key. Pipelines for longer shots, obscure water holes for closer sit/wait shots. Busting deer out of brush also happens, and they may stop long enough to have a pretty close shot. I have heard of food plots, but also that they are the biggest concentration of hunters - so we never asked.

I never saw anyone else on the trails, and the couple of guys I hunt with that have been several times have never seen anyone once out in the forest either. We do go during the week, so situation may be totally different during weekend. Hopefully I can make it for archery season one of these years, I would imagine the crowd is even less. If I recall correctly, you can hang a tree stand for 72 hours.

I did some when I was in school. It is THICK. Busting brush out there is not fun. Find some recent cuts and sit over them. There are also random natural waterholes that may produce.

[This message has been edited by Log (edited 10/25/2012 10:47a).]

I hunted there!!! 30 years ago sounded like I was in a battlefield...leased property ever since until I wised up and bought my own!!!

That would be my concern...idiots taking careless shots in thick brush.

I went with my Dad back in high school (this was around 1980). We bought topo maps and scouted all summer. Then we went out early opening morning and climbed up in our trees, and as the sun came up it got scary fast.

There were freaks walking around in street clothes with all manner of inappropriate firearms, in pretty large numbers. Shots were going off every few minutes. When we climbed down and headed back to our car late morning, there must have been another knucklehead behind every third tree carrying a .22 or a .38 special or some inappropriate POS weapon. And of course, nobody saw a single freaking deer.

We eventually found some dude who shot a tiny 4 pointer way back from any trail, and he had no idea what to do with the carcass. Some other guy agreed to help him gut it for half the meat, and the first thing he did was cut the deer in half right behind the rib cage. In other words, like one of those 2-person horse costumes where one guy is the back half and the other is the front.

Not wanting to get killed by another "hunter", especially when the chances of seeing a decent deer were next to zero, we never tried hunting there again.

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the first thing he did was cut the deer in half right behind the rib cage. In other words, like one of those 2-person horse costumes where one guy is the back half and the other is the fron

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Considering people will intentionally sit right in front of me when I dove hunt public, I'm afraid I would get shot multiple times deer hunting public...