You're bow hunting with a climbing stand. You're hunting transitions between short pines and hardwood bottoms or clearcuts (3 years old or older) and hardwood bottoms or both. Your approach is through the hardwoods in dry weather so everything is crunchy. How close will you try to get to bedding before climbing?

Take a leaf blower or a rake and make a trail to walk in on. I've done this before and it works great.

Course you would want to do this a good while before you hunt.

Just walk in early in the afternoon and don't worry about it. If it makes you feel better, get a stick and hit the ground right after you step to make you sound like ya got 4 legs. Lol. Unless you are like some folks I know, if you're going to get close enough, they will see you before they hear you usually.

Drag a rope behind you and that will cover up the rhythm of your steps.

I wait till grounds wet or raining to hunt sum places

Still a WHOLE lotta leafs yet to fall........

Carry a turkey mouth call with you and call as you walk, they hear turkeys all the time.

turkeys don't make climbing stand noise as he goes up the tree....

climbers make too much noise to get real close.

I'm thinking I need to rethink my strategy. There is NO acorn crop this year where I am hunting and it would seem therefore, little reason for any deer to get too far from the thick stuff. I've seen 3 deer so far in 5 hunts. 2 of them I jumped either coming into or leaving my spot. All were either on the edge of or within 50 yds of the thick stuff, which may not be that unusual, a lot of bottoms may barely be 50 yds across, but none of my usual trails I sit over seem to have especially fresh wear on them. My limited experience suggests that a deer will bed down wherever it feels like at the moment, but very often they want to be on or near the end of a point or knob overlooking a bottom with thick and nasty behind them, bucks especially. If they're not traveling very far through the bottoms then you have to get in their hip pocket to have a chance or call them in which I'm not any good at. It seems like maybe my best chance is to park on the bedding before they come in and wait for them, but again, if they're not cruising for acorns this time of year why would they stray too far at all from the thick and nasty unless they just want to stretch their legs and check out the fall foliage and how can you possibly predict something like that? Help me sort this out.

I'm wondering if I should just ditch the stand and stalk from the ground. That leaves me with the same problem though, they'll see and hear me moving long before I see them.

I don’t know what kind of land you’re hunting, but if you have thinned pines with new undergrowth I’d try that. We don’t have any acorns either in Colbert County. My only thought is to hunt fields in the evening and green growth (vines, briars, honey suckle, etc) in the morning. I haven’t seen any deer in the bottoms as I normally would when we have acorns. Most of our deer are being seen on fields the last 20 minutes....typical

I’ve had deer walk straight to my tree after climbing with a climber. Sometimes the noise is something that generates a little curiosity. I certainly wouldn’t want to be within 100-150 yards of a bedded buck.