Stand: Money Pit

Location: Montana

Mossy Oak Hunter: Eliot Strommen

Out West, many whitetails roam the points and strips of cottonwood and ash trees that border the rivers and the huge grain and hay fields nearby. One fall long bow hunter Eliot Strommen scouted such a series of points on his ranch and found them torn up with sign. Major doe trails wended into the woods from fields to the west and south. The timber patches were littered with rubs and scrapes.

Strommen could have hung a stand in any tree and seen deer, but he’s better than that. And he knows he has to be for 15-yard shots at bucks with his stick bow. He poked around and found the perfect ash tree near the nexus of the trails and within sight of a grassy clearing where he figured a lot of deer would gather each morning to browse and mingle before heading single file to a bedding area farther down by the Milk River.

Over the years he and other hunters have sat in the stand and watched hundreds of animals do just that.

“It’s one of our money spots,” says Strommen. “You’ll see massive scrape and rub lines on and near the doe trails. All kinds of bucks work through the point while traveling to other points up and down the river.” Strommen figures some 50 bucks have been arrowed from the money pit over the years, 75 percent of them Pope and Young animals.

Pointers: Say you hunt a property with two or three miles of river or creek bottom; several doe units will live in cover-laced points up and down the waterway, and rutting bucks will cruise from cover to cover checking on them; hang a stand in each point where access in and out is okay…set stands along the major deer trails that connect three or four points of timber…when you’re bowhunting a large point of trees, narrow things down for a shot by setting up downwind of a major intersection of two or three trails blazed with buck rubs and scrapes.