We then faced the seemingly daunting trek over multiple mountain passes en route to South Dakota through Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Dad made it through unplowed Interstate 90 to pick me up. The day of our departure a snowstorm was indeed moving across my hometown in central Washington. The companionship and shared drive time on the 2,600-plus-mile roundtrip affair was welcomed and appreciated. Accompanying me on the road trip was my Dad. Traveling during December in the Pacific Northwest, and to the Dakota territories no less, can be a crapshoot when it comes to weather clear skies can quickly turn to white-out blizzard conditions from the passing of a storm off the Pacific or dropping out of Canada’s arctic. Before I was able to stalk the fields of Brown County, however, I had to make it to South Dakota from Washington state. Plenty of ringneck carcasses litter the roadsides and vehicles around town sport smashed windshields and mirrors or have broken grills laced with feathers to prove that even the best evasion tactics often times fall short. So prodigious are their numbers, that a drive down the highway often feels like you’re playing a reverse version of the old video game “Frogger” more of your attention is expended watching for and eluding pheasants zipping crossing the roadway than it is actually on driving. You can witness flocks of up to a dozen (and sometimes more) working open fields and picking gravel along the road. Located in Brown County, in the northeast quadrant of the state, Aberdeen is estimated to have more than 200 pheasants inhabiting every square mile. Fortune smiled on me recently, as an invitation to hunt one of the hottest rooster-rich spots in South Dakota–the Aberdeen area–was extended to me. Wild flushes from a quarter-mile away before you can even exit your vehicle, educated birds that can evade both a perfectly positioned line of blockers and even the gifted noses of canines pose just some of the quandaries the upland hunter will endure–the weather is yet another factor that can poke holes in a road trip to the Dakotas in December. Even in a state like South Dakota, the top pheasant-hunting destination in the country, late-season, seen-it-all birds make for a difficult hunt.
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