So, for the final installment on mule deer record book research, we’re going to take a look at Nevada, Arizona, Montana and Utah. The order of recent submissions also seems to mirror the all time rankings of these four states, with Utah on top of Arizona, which is ahead of Montana, and Nevada bringing up the rear. I know I’ll be leaving out California, Oregon and Washington, but mule deer aren’t even the most numerous deer species in those states.
Utah is one of those states that usually comes to mind when thinking about mule deer hunting, but if you’ve read many of my past articles, you’ll know that I’m not a huge fan of the state of Utah's deer hunting outside of the 2 main trophy areas: the Paunsaugunt and the Henry Mountains.
When I write about special hunts and draw odds, I’m usually focused on rifle hunts. I vastly prefer to use my rifles over any other weapon as they are more interesting to me than archery and muzzleloading equipment, but in reality I use all three weapons. However, I do not hunt with primitive weapons solely for the challenge, the only reason I’ll pick one up is to expand my hunting options. 
For a little bit of a change of pace, let’s talk about moose hunting as a nonresident. Because I’m trying to focus on DIY hunts, I’m going to ignore Canada’s opportunities and resident-only hunts in the US. By limiting our scope to states that offer nonresident moose hunting we have just a handful of places to consider: Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.
In my last article on record book mule deer research, I really focused on Colorado, which is head and shoulders above the other Rocky Mountain States in terms of recent and historical mule deer entries. This time, I’d like to go into a little more depth on New Mexico, Wyoming, and Idaho, which are the next three highest entry states (but even combined wouldn’t reach Colorado’s total). That’ll leave Arizona, Utah, Montana and Nevada for the next entry. I’ll leave the three Pacific states out of this series, and maybe save them for a blacktail article down the road. There’s so few mule deer entries from California, Oregon, Washington and Great Plains states like Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Texas and Oklahoma that you really can’t learn anything or find much for patterns that you didn’t already expect based on the species distribution.
I could just title this article, “why Colorado is the best overall state for mule deer hunting," but since that won’t apply to trophy research for elk in future articles, let’s just go with Record Book Research. It had been a while since I last picked up a Boone and Crockett Record book, as my last edition was dated 1996 (Records of North American Elk and Mule Deer, 2nd edition). I was obviously way overdue, and looking at 50 year old records from the heyday of mule deer hunting just doesn’t really apply any more. Anyway, I did finally pick up the soon to be outdated 27th Big Game Awards book (2007-2009), which has the latest deer and elk entries, and wanted to share some of my findings and assumptions with you.
While writing my last entry on easy hunts, I felt that doing a late season or mule deer rut hunt was just too large of a topic to cover in a single paragraph. There are many aspects to mule deer rut hunting, especially as a trophy hunt, but here I wanted to focus on finding those mid to late November and early December hunts for an easier hunt.
The last article on 
Getting my girlfriend her first big game animal over the weekend brought up the need to set everything up properly for a newby’s first successful hunt. While I do not have children, I have been taking a new person or two under my wing about every year for the past four or five years and do have some opinions on how to do it right. I don’t want to focus just on children, as I believe inexperienced adults are even more important to the future of hunting.
I’m an incessant unit hopper. I have a handful of places that I like to return to, but it seems like I’m adding at least one or two new units every year to the rotation. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on what you’re after. Some people like a known entity and stability, others are always after greener pastures. So what I’d like to address in this article is the possible rationale for staying put or pushing on. 
