When a hunt starts slowly for a local legend “Two-Racked” buck, HuntStand is there to lead the way.
Three days into the 2018 Missouri deer rifle season, Justin Summy was frustrated. Although life had gotten a bit too busy for the 33-year-old hunter from St. Joseph to hang a few pre-hunt game cameras, he knew, after talks with a neighbor, that he was hunting the stomping grounds of an unusually large buck. But the first two days of the season had been a bust. That’s when Summy leaned on the detailed mapping tools in the HuntStand app for inspiration, and on Day Three of the hunt, Summy changed hunt locations and became the 12th and final weekly winner in our 2018 Big Buck ALERT contest.
Here is Summy’s exciting story of how he anchored one of the country’s best bucks last fall:
“The rifle portion of deer season in Missouri opened on the morning of November 10, 2018. Prior to opening day, I had the HuntStand Hunting app downloaded for just a short amount of time and to that point, merely toyed around with it a bit, especially the ScoutTreX and MapMarX tools,” Summy wrote. “One of my goals was to get a visual on the local deer trails and my stand entry/exit paths, and I also marked any scrapes and rubs that I had observed, on my family’s hunting property in north-central Missouri.
“As the season approached I didn’t have any spare time to set game cameras to know exactly what was walking through the area. However, after speaking with a neighbor, he said that he had been watching a particular buck that he had been capturing on his game cameras for more than a year. Interestingly, the neighbor said that for some odd reason, the large buck in question still had last year’s antlers that apparently were never shed. Even stranger, it appeared that the buck’s new 2018 rack was attempting to grow around the previous year’s rack, which the buck continued to carry.
“The first two days of the season were very quiet, with very limited activity, and I was growing frustrated. Early Monday in the predawn darkness I fired up the ScoutLook Hunting app to view my map of the property, on which I had added all the major trails and points of interest. As I studied the map I could see what appeared to be a trend of local deer activity, and this discovery, in combination with the app’s ScentCone feature, helped me determine where I would sit that morning.
“I ended up posting midway up a steep hill looking downhill into a deep valley facing west that gave me a nice and wide, commanding view. About 6:57 a.m. I watched a doe walk down the west hill toward the valley, headed right at me. I just watched her walk slowly, and thought that she was acting odd. Immediately I suspected a buck was behind her. Shortly thereafter, a buck appeared, also walking slowly. I figured he had been chasing for a long time as they both looked exhausted.
“At this point I still had not picked up my rifle. This was in the timber, and since it was early, there was not much daylight. As the two deer continued closing on my position I started to notice just how large the buck’s rack was; when he suddenly turned his head to the side I could count plenty of typical points.
“At that point I raised my rifle to get a closer look through the scope; when the buck put his nose to the ground I could see several non-typical points between the rack’s sweeping main beams. At that point my heart began pounding harder than when I shot my first deer, but I knew the walking buck was headed toward a good shooting window between two trees. When the buck reached that spot, near the creek bottom at the base of the hill where I was sitting, I made probably the best shot that I have ever taken. The buck literally collapsed; there was no running, no stumbling. Still, I waited an hour and a half to approach him. I wanted to ensure the buck was expired, and for the numbness in my legs to go away so I could walk properly! 
“After walking up to him I could see he was even bigger than he appeared in my riflescope; I counted 27 points. Thank you HuntStand! This was the best hunting experience of my life!”
Summy will be the last of 12 weekly winners of our 2018 Big Buck ALERT contest to receive BOTH the Bino Harness X (valued at $49.99) AND Vital X rangefinder pocket (valued at $19.99) from ALPS OutdoorZ (see above). 
Later this week, all weekly winners will be placed in a drawing for our Grand Prize. The Winner will GET THEIR CHOICE of a Leupold BX-2 Tioga HD 8X42 binocular (shown above, a $389.99 value) OR a Leupold VX-Freedom 3-9×40 CDS riflescope (see below), a $389.99 value. 
Be sure to click in later this week to hear about our Grand Prize winner. From all of us here at Team HuntStand, thanks for your many outstanding entries…success stories fueled by the best hunting app on the planet!
