All the BLM land you are talking about east and south of Worland is what the locals call the badlands and they call it that for a reason! It is landscape more like the moon than anything you will see other than going to the actual Badlands of SD itself. That area on over to the Bluebank Road is only open for deer the first ten days of October and it's designed that way so nonresidents won't go into it much because the rest of the region doesn't open until 10/15. Deer are spread out so thin unless you hunt the area south of Worland near the west boundary where it's private agricultural land that it's not worth the effort. I went out for the entire month of October three years ago and spent almost the entire season in unit 164 with a buddy in the BLM you're talking about and we didn't see more than 20 deer and two dinky bucks the entire time. There are also very few decent access roads there, other than around the perimeter until you go way south. The other public areas you're talking about over closer to TenSleep are better, but most of the animals are still down in the Nowater river bottom private agricultural properties there too. That's why Region M has hundreds of leftover tags every year, which is common in Wyoming where there is a lot of BLM in areas that don't hold many deer on the BLM land. The only reason I hunt M every year is because of friends who know a couple ranchers in the area and we do okay around them, but we rarely see any bucks big enough to get excited about. I'm building Preference Points right now to get away from that area one year and will try to draw a tag over toward Meeteetse or possibly way up toward Montana in Region R for a chance at a good buck. If anybody else tells you much different than what we have, I would have to say they aren't telling you the truth because there just aren't enough deer on most of the BLM land to make it worthwhile for a firsttimer to go out there with no knowledge of the area. Very little of the BLM land is marked either and without a very good map with exact waypoints for the boundaries, you are also really risking a trespassing ticket and that's a minimum of $200 out there. PS: To the best of my knowledge the black bears mentioned in the LTLR post are basically up in the Big Horn Mountains further to the east where there is a lot of timber. We have only seen one down in the lower elevations where we hunt in 17 years out there.
