I posted earlier that a guy right here in our camp fell from a climbing stand and was injured... Now I learn that over at Dolan Lake, which is about 15 miles east of here a hunter fell and was found dead by a crew that went to look for him after he failed to return to camp.

It is very sad and.I wonder if the proper precautions were observed in each of these incidents...

Good luck, Jim and everybody on this thread hopes you get a deer, but above all, stay safe from treestand mishaps and other hunters rounds.

My uncle fell out of a Loc-on type treestand many years ago. HE survived, however, he lives with two steel rods inserted in his back.

It took paramedics 9 hours to get him off the mountain to where a four-wheel drive could take him to the ambulance. That doesn't include the time it took my cousin to get to help while he lay there wondering his fate.

It seems every hunter has this same type of story - someone in their family or someone they know has fallen - with varying degrees of damage once it happens.

There is a lesson there for every hunter if we will just learn it.

I cannot sit Loc Ons any more if they do not have a frontal bar - which most of them do not...I am too afraid of falling.

My brother fell asleep in one several years ago and fell eighteen feet - right off of the front of the stand

Miraculously nothing was broken - but he was in bed for three days just from the trauma

His buddy was only about three hundred yards away but my brother siad he was so dazed he could not even shout - he just walked out of the woods and up to the house - and the landowner took him to the hospital

Jim, glad to hear your brother was OK. He's lucky he didn't have any serious injuries.

Sportsmansguide.com sells those shooting rails that flip up out of the way for about $30. I bet they work great, being able to flip them up for bowhunting. I have a couple of home-made shooting rails that really aid in shooting and give me a bit of security while on stand, but they don't flip up.

I have designed and built a couple of chain ons that have a perimiter system that affords fairly good security

One has a flip up style front rail and one is fixed

That is just the thing...even for bowhunting, I do not want to flip the rail up...I need to be able to shoot over it which means it has to be a fairly tight (close to your hips) type of rail.

My challenge right now is weight...I cannot weld aluminum but intend to upgrade my wire welder over the winter so I can start to do some fabrication work with aluminum in the spring.

By this time next year maybe I will have stumbled on to the right design that works for bow and gun hunting alike.

I am toying with a design that allows for unrestricted bow hunting but also offers a flip up style rifle rest so the stand could be used for close in bow hunting or even placed on a power line and someone could do some long range centerfire work.

Great idea, I had not thought of a front guard / rest system that was adjustable...

Hunting private land, weight is not the greatest concern because I use either the four wheeler or the tractor to take most stands to the woods... in most cases, I can take it right to the tree or maybe only have to carry / drag it 200 yards or less.

I have leased a new farm for 2011 and on that property, there is hardly any place I can not get on the 4 wheeler.

Using the chain-on style stand on public property (if I do that again, right now I am up in the air) is the issue - where I was in Illinois you had to carry anything you wanted into the woods.

Some of my stand locations were 800 + meters from the parking areas and that just flat wore me out, even with the 24 pound climber... no way I could carry a steel chain on in there like the one I posted earlier.

To your other point, we have used a rope and pulley system to hoist chain on stands for years.... it just makes it so much safer and easier.

I will draw up some preliminary plans once season is over - I usually work on stands in January and February - and post them and let you folks review them and see what you think.

Once March gets here, it is back on the tractor and working on plots...

Wind is one of the most crucial variables in any kind of big game hunting. It helps level the playing field between a hunter with a scoped rifle and the game animals being hunted. This is not novel information. Any hunter who has consistent success in the field knows this. I have tried a couple different techniques for keeping track of the wind. Here are a couple.
The most simple and obvious is to just stay cognizant of it. It is amazing how slight of a breeze you can sense if you just pay...