The Case for Hunting California

I think California gets a bad rap as a hunting state. When most people think about California, they think about beaches, Hollywood, anti-gun people. Hunting usually isn’t anywhere near the top of the list. But I’ve spent enough time wandering around the  backcountry here to think that California is actually one of the more interesting places in the country to hunt. It’s got a combination of things that are pretty hard to find anywhere else, and most people who don’t hunt here have no idea what they’re missing.

For one thing, California has an incredibly long deer season. You can spend a big chunk of the year chasing deer, depending on where you’re hunting and what weapon you’re carrying. Hunting season doesn’t have to be some frantic three-day window where everybody piles into the woods at the same time. You can get out early, get skunked, come back later, and keep at it. You have time to actually figure out how the animals are using the country.

The tag system is another thing I think people outside California misunderstand. A lot of our deer tags are available over the counter, and there are opportunities to hunt multiple zones with those tags. You can also buy a bear tag over the counter. That’s a pretty remarkable thing when you step back and look at it. You can live in California, decide you want to hunt a bear, go buy a tag, and head into the mountains and give it a shot. You don’t necessarily have to spend years collecting preference points and waiting for your name to come up.

And there are bears here. A lot of them. The funny thing is that California has a pretty healthy black bear population, but bear hunting doesn’t have nearly the same cultural presence here that it does in a lot of other states. There are plenty of people who live in California who have probably never seen a bear in the wild, and there are even fewer who are actually out there hunting them. That means if you’re willing to learn how to glass, understand the food sources, and spend enough time walking around the mountains, there’s a legitimate opportunity sitting right there.

Then you have the sheer size and variety of the state. California is enormous, and there’s a tremendous amount of public land. You’ve got the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, the deserts, the foothills, the oak woodlands, the high country, and all these rugged mountain ranges running down toward the Pacific. You can hunt mule deer in country that looks like the Great Basin, then drive a few hours and find yourself in thick timber or coastal mountains. It’s hard to think of many places where you can get that much variety without leaving the state.

The Central Coast is probably the place that really makes the case for me. There’s something pretty strange about hunting deer in the mountains and being able to look out and see the Pacific Ocean. You’re climbing through oak trees and chaparral, glassing steep canyons, and somewhere beyond the next ridge is the ocean. You can have fog rolling through the mountains in the morning and be standing in bright California sunshine later in the day. It’s not the kind of scenery most people associate with hunting, but once you’ve done it, it’s hard to forget.

And then there’s the population. California has nearly 40 million people, but hunting is still a relatively small part of the culture here. That sounds contradictory until you actually get out into the backcountry. Yes, there are an awful lot of people living in California, but they’re not evenly distributed across the landscape. Most of them are concentrated in a handful of enormous metropolitan areas. Get away from those places and you can still find some remarkably empty country. You can spend a morning hiking into a canyon and realize you haven’t seen another person all day.

That doesn’t mean California hunting is easy. In fact, that might be one of the reasons I like it. The terrain can be steep and unforgiving. Water can be hard to come by. Some of the country is thick enough that you can walk right past a deer without ever knowing it was there. Other places are so open that you can glass for hours and see absolutely nothing. Access takes some planning, and sometimes you have to earn a spot by putting a lot of miles on your boots.

But I think that’s where California starts to get interesting. The state doesn’t necessarily make hunting convenient. It gives you an opportunity and then makes you figure out the rest. You have to learn the country. You have to understand where the deer are going to be when the weather changes. You have to know where the water is, where the food is, and where you can get into the mountains without spending half the day fighting your way through brush.

And when it all comes together, you can have a pretty incredible hunt. You might be sitting on a ridge at daylight watching the fog lift off the Santa Lucia Mountains, with the Pacific Ocean sitting somewhere beyond it. You might spend the afternoon glassing an oak canyon for a mule deer, then hike back toward camp as the light disappears behind the mountains. Those are the kinds of days that remind me why I like hunting here in the first place.

I’m not saying California is the easiest place to hunt, and I’m certainly not saying it’s the best place to hunt for everybody. But I do think it’s one of the most overlooked hunting states in the country. We have long seasons, over-the-counter opportunities, bears, deer, enormous amounts of public land, and some of the most spectacular scenery you could possibly ask for while carrying a rifle or bow.

The funny thing is that you don’t really have to convince a California hunter of any of this. They already know. The rest of the country can keep thinking California is just beaches and traffic. I’m perfectly happy letting them believe that. There’s something nice about knowing that a few hours from all that noise, there are still mountains where you can hike all day, glass a canyon, and not see another person.

That’s a pretty good hunting state in my book.