Squirrel Season

  With a couple of hours to kill in the evening, my brother and I put in a couple of hours at a spot north of the lake. Spotted zero squirrels, sweated an ungodly amount, and remembered that August squirrel hunting is best done in the morning!

  I try to avoid squirrel hunting when deer and bear season is active, so I put this together as a simpler reference guide to keep track of the overlapping dates. Just for nearby WMAs. Frankly, getting access to private land near by home would be a gamechanger, but I imagine just about everybody feels that way!

 Made it out at dawn on Saturday for what was going to be a couple hours of hunting. I drive a Corolla, nothing fit for rough roads, so that usually means parking at the last easy parking area and then going on foot via road then trail then bushwhacking to wherever it is I've decide to sit. On this morning, I also planned to pick up a camera I'd left out early in the summer. No sooner had I jumped off the trail to start bushwhacking did I hear squirrels in the trees chasing each other. Pausing for maybe five minutes to watch and listen, five different squirrels were moving around in the nearby canopy.  Three were together in the same small clump of trees so I focused on those and moved in closer, tree to tree. I still get a little adrenaline dump when realizing I'm likely to get a shot, so using the trees as a resting post makes a huge difference for controlling my wobble.  The first shot I took felt steady, but either a slight flinch caused the round to hit far forward on

  Made it out to the rifle range at Chestnut Mountain today, along with quite a few other fellas with the same idea. Actually, its always this way. There are few outdoor shooting ranges in the area, so the ones that are around and public get hit pretty hard all the time. I'd like to get up to the Sumac one in Cohutta, but its too far to go without a great reason. The Chestnut Mountain one is close to work, so getting up there over a slightly long lunch break is doable. My shooting today was poor. It was so poor in fact that I started to wonder if it was some kind of gear issue. I put about 50 rounds through and didn't get much better results, so I packed it up. Could have been the crowd, the noise, of whatever, but didn't want to waste any more ammo doing nothing productive. I drove back down toward work and stopped in at the indoor range in Calhoun. It was quiet and that seemed to make all the difference. The lanes are only 25yards there, but for a .22lr that should be alr