The director of marketing for Nexus Outdoors, Steve Allie, doesn’t talk about scent control in only a business sense. Allie climbs into a tree every fall in his home state of Michigan and the Midwest, chasing his next trophy buck, using scent control tactics as his number one weapon against a deer's powerful sense of smell.
Like clockwork, at 8:00 a.m. on the opening day of firearms season, I received a text from my father, saying that he was climbing down from his stand and was going on a walk; this had become his yearly routine. For several years, I disagreed with my father's decision to take off walking instead of staying in his stand. Though it was not my hunting style, it worked for him on many occasions. After my father's text, it wasn’t long before I heard the blast from a distant gunshot.
The rut was just starting to heat up and bucks were cruising. Like so many of my hunts during the rut, I was planning to sit all day. It was one of the first colder days of the season; temperatures were in the low thirties, but it was supposed to warm up a bit in the afternoon. I chose the ScentLok BE:1 Voyage Jacket and Pant for these conditions because the tailored, single-layer system has an ideal warmth-to-weight ratio.
The rut was in full swing and I was planning an all-day sit. It was cold in the morning – somewhere in the high teens – but I knew it was going to warm up into the mid-thirties in the middle of the day. It had also been dead calm the first few hours in the mornings and in the evenings.
