To be successful on public land, the author believes you must develop an intimate knowledge of your chosen hunting area. Some species, like this British Columbia mountain goat, are almost exclusively found on public land.

Too many hunters write off public land as waste acres for those unfortunates who can't afford to hunt private tracts. Wildlife agency holdings, and those of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, accommodate many people but yield few trophy-class animals. Campsites are hard to find and defend. Rutted trails carry platoons of sportsmen. Forests and ridge tops blossom in blaze orange. If they aren't already living on privately owned cropland, animals flee the mob, leaving empty coverts. The grim truth? Sometimes. But public land can surprise you.

A couple of years ago, hunting on a Utah ranch, I found a contingent of elk. One of the several mature bulls was a tremendous 6-point. My problem: None of them would move off public land. The Forest Service tract bordering the private parcel for which I had a tag lay below a steep ridge. While any hunter had road access to the ridge, nobody seemed willing to climb it and scout its back slope.

A season before, I'd climbed into a timbered north face and poked around in its thickets for most of a day. I was very tired when, late in the afternoon, I stepped over a deadfall. Two bulls bedded on its far side thundered off on different paths, crashing toward the canyon bottom. I leaped forward, found an alley through the lodgepoles and shouldered my rifle just as an elk filled the gap. He fell to one bullet from my 6.5x55. All that excitement came on public land less than a mile from a well-traveled forest road a week into the season.

The best mule deer I've taken have come from USFS land in Oregon and Crown land in British Columbia. The biggest mule deer I've ever seen was on public land.

Now, most trophy whitetails seem to stay on private property. You'd expect that, given their adaptability to small tracts and the whitetail's dense populations in the Midwest and East. The fervor for big whitetail antlers also compels land managers to plant forage specifically to lure and nourish mature bucks. Some states buy or lease blocks of land for public whitetail hunting; however, these get heavy pressure. Old bucks exit for posted land. Still, if you're not obsessed with antler inches, you can find good whitetail hunting in the state-owned forests of the Upper Midwest and New England.

Game is often pushed from private land back onto public land late in the season.

Whitetails are an exception among big game animals. Almost every other North American species is most often taken on public land. Bears, moose, goats and sheep occur most commonly on public domain. While the highest-scoring elk, mule deer and pronghorns now die on private property, many still frequent public lands at least part of the year. Migrating animals cross boundaries in the fall, either gaining protection on posted acreage or becoming vulnerable to persistent hunters on public holdings.

Brisk demand for better big game hunting has fueled a land-leasing industry funded by sportsmen with the means to gain exclusive access to property once open to the public. You can't blame landowners for milking this cash cow. Besides the money, they get free policing of their property and less pressure on the game. Increasingly, people of means are buying farms and ranches expressly for their hunting potential. In Texas, land value has long been tied to hunting opportunity. This connection is now common Westwide and is showing up in the Midwest.