bemidji area and Itasca state park

[mudtracker]

Anyone been hunting up there is it worth the six hour drive for me? Looking to get a couple meat deer

[mudtracker]

hmm no comments must be good hunting and noone wants to share lol

[germanshorthairs]

hunted both weekends up there. I have been going to the park for years. A fare amount of deer but tons of hunters. I would say it is not worth a six hr. drive. The DNR makes it seem like there are tons of deer with early anterless and five tags but there really is not that many. The early anterless season really makes all the deer in the area nocturnal. So it is really tough unless you have a lot of guys and you like to drive really thick woods. I am not very happy with the way the DNR had the early season. Its like having a early fishing opener. Just my two cents.

[summit090706]

Hello all, my hunting party has hunted Itasca state park for about 20 years and we always get some but have to work pretty hard for them. We ended up shooting 10 with 3 bucks (1 basket 7, 1 basket 8, and one nice 8 with huge G2's.). I spoke to someone about that early anterless hunt and I heard it was a bust that they didn't get hardly any. We started seeing some bucks chasing does and deer coming out of the swamps. I think that the big issue is not the hunters (which I actually think is less then in past years when we had a lottery for anterless and anyone that hunted the park would get one) but the wolfs. Lots of them... Anyway good luck in the future

[ruster]

If you have access to private land the hunting can be very good. Public land is crowded and the sucess this has been lower than past years. I have hunted every day so far this season and have seen minimal buck activity during shooting hours. Hopefully this week the bucks get more active.

[lcornice]

Quote:

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Hello all, my hunting party has hunted Itasca state park for about 20 years and we always get some but have to work pretty hard for them. We ended up shooting 10 with 3 bucks (1 basket 7, 1 basket 8, and one nice 8 with huge G2's.). I spoke to someone about that early anterless hunt and I heard it was a bust that they didn't get hardly any. We started seeing some bucks chasing does and deer coming out of the swamps. I think that the big issue is not the hunters (which I actually think is less then in past years when we had a lottery for anterless and anyone that hunted the park would get one) but the wolfs. Lots of them... Anyway good luck in the future

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There were 900 antlerless deer killed in 184 over the early antlerless season. Itasca should be 0 because it wasn't open to early antlerless hunting.

[summit090706]

I stand correct, from the HSOforum it doesn't show 287 as an early anterless area. I spoke with a Park Ranger and he was the one that stated that it was a bust so not sure if he was talking about the program in general or what. Thanks for the correction.