It’s easy to get discouraged when your hunts don’t look like the highly successful and adrenaline-fueled ones you see in hunting media. But trips where you don’t see anything can still be valuable and informative. One of my wife's friends who is an ultra-marathoner believes that no time up and about is wasted effort and expresses this sentiment with her personal motto, "It's all time on your feet." I have come to realize the value in adopting a similar mindset when it comes to getting into the field and have come to view any time spent amongst the trees through the lens of, "It's all time in the woods."

I remember one specific trip I made up to Sam Houston National Forest where that mindset was particularly valuable. With the national forest being public land and hogs being legal game year round in Texas, I decided to make a trek out there for some post-deer season hunting. I did some e-scouting beforehand and picked my access points, identified terrain features to investigate, and mapped out potential travel routes. After packing everything up the night before, I was ready to get into the woods.

I drove out on a weekday in hopes of having the place to myself, which was a good call. I got to the national forest around 9am and turned down a forest service road, driving on unpaved gravel for slightly over a mile until I hit the pipeline ROW I had been targeting as a travel corridor. I grabbed my hunting day pack - nothing more than an oversized fanny pack/utility belt that holds my hunting license, game bags, gloves, some granola bars, binoculars, a rangefinder, a water bottle, and my hunting knife. I pulled my grandpa's Marlin 336 chambered in .35 Remington out of the trunk, thumbed five rounds into the side-loading gate, and set off up the ROW.

Having never been to this location before, I tried to move slowly, taking in the surroundings and watching for movement and sign. The ROW was mostly covered in pine needles and I walked a ways while not really seeing much of anything. When I crested a rise that dropped down towards a creek I had identified with aerial maps, I slowed even further, knowing that the creek would definitely serve as a water source and could be a travel corridor for animals. I ranged the creek bed from the crest of the rise and clocked it at 160 yards, with a clear line of sight down into the creek bottom. I made a mental note that for future excursions, setting up on the top of the rise with my .270 Winchester looking down the ROW would make for a perfect sit opportunity.

As I continued down the ROW and came closer to the creek, I finally began seeing sign - hog rootings (probably old from the amount of leaves, sticks, and pine needles on top of them), as well as what looked like both hog and deer tracks. I approached the creek carefully so as not to spook anything headed in either direction along the creek. Seeing and hearing nothing, I dropped into the creek bed and headed downstream. I stayed on the sandbars as much as I could and when I had to get my boots wet, I tried to step as lightly as possible so as to not create splashing sounds. In the creek bottom were even more tracks, raccoon and coyote mixed in with the hog and deer tracks I had already seen, some of which looked fresh in the damp mud. This confirmed my suspicion that wildlife was indeed using the creek as a travel corridor.

The Marlin I was carrying felt noticeably lighter than the .360 Buckhammer rifle I had to carry earlier in the season in Big Thicket National Preserve to abide by the straight wall regulations, and I was grateful for how handy and easy the Marlin felt to carry. Eventually brush crowded in the creek and I had to climb out the bank in order to continue on. Once on top of the creek and moving through the riparian zone, I found additional old rooting and tracks. The brush here was noticeably less dense than it had been in Big Thicket, which made travel faster and easier. However, it continued to get thicker and after reaching an impasse, I trekked back towards the ROW and once there, I dropped back down in the creek bottom, now heading upstream direction. The creek eventually turned to come from the north and following it further, I came to a dilapidated bridge that served as a crossing for a trail over the creek. I again climbed out of the creek to the west bank and followed the trail, which intersected the ROW a ways north of the creek. At this point, it was past noon and I felt accomplished, having scouted several hundred yards upstream and downstream of the ROW and getting a lay of the land. I walked back up the rise on the south side of the ROW, and headed back to the car. It had been a pleasant day in the forest and I was content that even though I hadn't seen any animals, it was all time in the woods.