Public Land Whitetail in ID?

[Joecal6]

My dad and I have wasted the last two days driving around the Moscow/Troy area trying to find a place to camp and hunt whitetail. We haven't been able to find any decent place to camp on public land. The FS roads have no pull outs and the campgrounds are closed. My uncle who lives over here was supposed to set us up on some land, but that fell through. This has been such a bust that I'd rather drive back home to WA (Yakima) than waste another day of fruitless driving. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Joe

 

[roknHS]

Moscow Mountain has lots of areas you can camp and hunt. The Park area near Helmer has lots of areas you can camp and hunt.
Vassar Meadows near Deary has lots of areas you can camp and hunt. You can access thousands of acres of U of I land off Rock Creek Rd. South of Potlatch. Lots of places to camp and hunt up the East Fork of Potlatch Cr. outside Bovill. Gold Hill North of Potlatch has lots of areas to camp and hunt. I could go on and on. I don't know what you consider a "decent" place is. In my experience there are hundreds of "decent" opportunities for camping and hunting in Latah and Benewah counties. How about the Palouse River area near Sand Creek......Big Sand and Little Sand.
I think you failed on the research end of your hunt. I'm a local and I'm telling you there are easy access areas with decent camping all over. I've mentioned enough to keep you busy hunting for the next 10 years.
Now go have some fun.

 

[Joecal6]

I agree with you on the failure to research. By the time we found out that my uncle's promise to set us up in an area fell through (about 3 weeks ago) we didn't have any time to head over and scout due to going hunting locally in WA - our seasons are very short unlike in ID. I guess that is what you get for relying on family... We drove all around the FS roads by Helmer and Deary and the campgrounds were closed. The only other areas were just wide spots in the road, then it would turn into private property. We would park and walk down a little skid road only to see a cabin/house after 1/4 mile.

By "decent" I mean being able to find a nice flat spot off the road where we can camp and then hike out from there and hunt. In our experience, those were significantly lacking. Maybe we weren't on the right roads, but it seems like we drove on a ton of them and we either saw property that was posted or small pull outs that would barely hold a truck and camper.

I'm going to scour the internet in the next couple weeks though and maybe head back over Thanksgiving weekend. For what I had to pay for an out of state tag/license I don't want that $$ to go to waste.

Thanks for the reply, I'll look up those roads.

 

[Joecal6]

Also, it was interesting that on all the roads we drove, we didn't see anyone camping. All we saw were trucks with ramps and quad trailers - so maybe we should just ditch the camper and bring our quads over.