we hunted the silver lake unit twice. very very poor hunts each year. wish i could offer advise on the area but we had no luck at all.

Welcome to BGH mattman.

I've never hunted that unit either. When I hunt it's usually close to home.

There are some deer there but not an easy unit to learn the first year. Would not be my first pick but the odds of drawing a tag are good so some like it.

Hey all, I live in the Silver Lake unit. It is pretty scarse right now. A lot of moisture this summer has the deer still very high. I would recommend staying in the south end of the unit. WInter rim above paisly and summer lake are good but you need to scout it for most of the late summer and it is extremely steep and rugged. There are some deer left but the require a lot of work. We have three main issues concerning our plummeting Mule Deer populations. 1) ODFW, had massive Doe hunts in both Silver Lake and FT Rock units over about a 10 year period. This decimated the local deer populations. This was apperantly done in order to bring back the Elk. 2) Cougar populations are exponentially increasing, the cats are predators of oppertunity and they are having a very large impact on our deer. 3) Bad winters/ droughts, these typical weather patterns are impacting the deer much more than they typically would due to low numbers and added stress'. The solutions: control cat populations and get people at ODFW that understand the local ecosystems for the areas in which they operate. Email me or post a reply if anyone is interested in talking about hunting in SE Oregon, I've lived and hunted about everything we have down here. I'm hosting a coyote derby in Jan. Go to Events and take a look at the details.

Thank you all. Went again this last wekend and again nothin but does. We had a couple great camping trips though.