Ep. 1060: Foundations – How to Set Up Ladderstands the Right Way

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Tony Peterson.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. This week, I’m going to talk about ladder stands and how you can set them up in ways that will keep the deer coming by all season long, sit after sit. The cool thing about modern deer hunting is that we have access to a lot of gear. The bad thing about that is that a lot of the gear that we do have access to can make hunting unintentionally more difficult by mostly promising to make things much easier. I’m going to place ladder stands in that weird category, but it’s mostly because of how we use them. This type of stand is a great option for certain situations, but it’s also easy to use them wrong. I’m going to talk about all of that more right now. On any random Tuesday night, I can go to Target and buy groceries, and when I do, I can walk through an aisle that is stocked to the gills with spices like black pepper. You literally cannot go to someone’s house or any restaurant ranging from fast food to steakhouses that wouldn’t even let someone like me in, and every one of them is going to have a pepper shaker or a fresh pepper grinder for every table. It’s hard to imagine, but at one point in our history, black pepper was considered black gold, and it is often considered the most influential spice in our history. It originated in southwestern India and became so valuable in Europe that it was accepted as payment for rent, and it was displayed as a symbol of wealth and was a key component in creating fortunes during the Middle Ages. Of course, you wouldn’t expect to have pepper without salt, which is a very common commodity today us and well, all the animals we love need sodium to survive. Plus we’ve only had modern refrigeration for a little while in the Grand Scoop of our evolution, so salt helped our ancestors preserve meat and fish, helped store food throughout the winter, help supply armies on long campaigns and times of war and help support long distance journeys across the open ocean. Salt was so important that the Romans built a series of roads connecting salt producing regions and cities, with one even called via Celaria, which means salt road transport some salt inland. I guess to have salt, you gotta have salt mines. And if you could hop in a time machine and head back roughly seven thousand years ago, you’d see that in some areas of the world this was big business. Areas like a specific region of Austria which is widely known to have the oldest salt mine that is still in operation. Salt which was called White Gold, which also kind of reminds me of a guy I know who did a year and a half in prison and earned the nickname White Chocolate for his basketball skills, has been mined from a mountain above the town of Hallstatt for so long that it gives us an amazing glimpse into how ancient people extracted this valuable resource. The conditions at this mine are perfect for preservation, unlike much of the conditions throughout the world, and this allows us to see organic materials from that time, you know, things like textiles, leather tools, mining equipment, and a whole host of stuff that gets archaeologists real excited, including wood artifacts. Now, in a lot of archaeological sites, use of wood has to be inferred, mostly from the stone that’s left behind. But in that salt mine above Hallstatt, archaeologists found the oldest usage of wooden ladders, which miners used at the tail end of the Bronze Age to get around in the mine shafts, which was a job I would guess had a fairly high rate of well death. Ladders are amongst humanity’s oldest tools. They appear in mythology, religion, military engineering, architecture, and everyday labor across pretty much every civilization. And you have to imagine that ancient humans climb trees for various reasons, you know, maybe to get to a better vantage point, to see game traveling across the plains, or to reach some honey or fruit, or maybe just to get away from someone or something that wanted to eat and kill them. And at some point, after climbing enough trees, they must have thought, man, it would be nice if there was a climbable tree next to that cliff with all of the bee hives on it, so we could reach that honey too. Voila, an idea is born. Take a tree with you, but make it the kind of tree that is lightweight and purpose built to allow us to easily go up and down from ancient Egypt to Rome and Greece and Japan and South Asia and medieval Europe and various indigenous cultures throughout the world. Latter use is well documented. I bet you own at least two like I do. One aluminum ladder that you used to get up on your garage roof so you can clean out the gutters and engage in hand to stinger combat with a bunch of wasps. And a smaller step ladder that has the structural integrity of a bowl of jello that you use to get from the garage roof to the house roof and which almost gave out on you one time, so you had to hang on for dear life, and you hurt your shoulder a little. And you’re still a little pissed that your wife acts like that chores no big deal, even though in twenty years of marriage you’ve never not once seen her up on the roof even though she likes to say things like do you think we should clean the gutters soon? I guess one of us is there in spirit every time. You probably own a couple ladders, and you very well might own a ladder stand or three for hunting the wily whitetail. Ladder stands have a lot of appeal and they are a very natural conclusion to come to when you think about shooting deer from sixteen to twenty feet up in a tree, but also don’t want to fall and break both of your ankles. I have a couple of ladder stands, and I’ll say this, I have always loved them, and I have always hated them. The reasons for loving them are obvious. They’re easy to get into an auto. That’s the primary advantage in my opinion. But they can also allow you to sit with some someone else if you opt for a two person model, Sitting with a kid or someone else can be a blast, and there isn’t much of a better way to do it than a double ladder stand. They can allow you to set up a season long spot in a way where it’s always an easy thing to go to for an evening or a morning sit and Ladder stands are a great option for all day sits because you can really set yourself up for comfort. Ladder stands are great for older hunters and younger hunters. There’s a lot of good to be had if you go this route. But let me explain why I hate them before I get into how to set them up as well as you possibly can. Reason number one is that they are not portable at all. I know they can be moved, but ladder stands are generally crazy heavy, and if they are made to not be heavy, they are often very spartan and not that much fun to use. I don’t know. It’d be kind of like if you bought a luxury car and you took out the seats and instead sat on milk rates. For some stupid reason. The weight of ladder stands makes them a dicey proposition for getting them set up as well. If you’ve never done the balancing act of trying to get a ladder stand to stand up and hit the right spot on your chosen tree, and then had to climb a not secured stand to be the guy who secures it, you might not know this. It’s just generally a stressful endeavor for all involved, and you usually need two people involved. Ladder stands are also often just kind of loud. They require a lot of pins and bolts and metal on metal points of contact. And the thing about a ladder with a heavy metal part on top of it is that there’s a little extra torque in the whole thing, which becomes really evident when you climb up one in the dark and are hoping to stay whisper quiet. Sometimes it’s just a little rattle of metal, but sometimes it’s a full on pop that rings through the woods in much the same way an airhorn would if you were stupid enough to use it for any reason in the woods. I guess. Ladder stands also almost always come with a shooting rail for gun hunters and I guess crossbow hunters now. And if you’re just a bowhunter, or often a bow hunter, you know what this is like. You know, some shooting rails can pivot out of the way, which is rarely silent, and then you still have a big metal cage in the vicinity of your bow limbs when you draw. The ones that don’t move are worse, and they will factor into how you shoot a bow from them pretty much every time While this isn’t personally an issue because I don’t mess around when it comes to tree stand safety, one thing about ladder stands that doesn’t get enough attention is the illusion of safety. I don’t know if these numbers are still accurate, but for a long time one of the major safety harness companies would gather tree stand accident data and the results were interesting. Of the roughly two dozen deaths a year from tree stand falls, about half of them were from ladder stands. People don’t think they need lifelines or safety harnesses when hunting from a ladder stand, but they don’t factor in that unintentional mid morning snooze where they might pay headfirst out to the ground, or the fact that ladders can get icy, or that it’s just gravity at play and we sometimes make clumsy, dumb mistakes. I am old enough to remember when it was very common to not use safety harnesses at all, and I don’t know how many times I heard people say they wouldn’t be able to draw their both if they were wearing one. I’m sure that sounds nuts now, but it wasn’t that long ago where it was pretty common. Tree stand safety is no joke, and that goes for ladder stands. Okay, now all of that is aside. They are a great choice for certain situations, but you can put in some extra effort to make them a really good option just for starters. And to reiterate the point I just made, a good way to just begin this is to have a single or a double lifeline ready to go. Just harness up so you’re secured on the way up and down and you won’t have to worry about using a walker to get to the fridge anytime soon. But also think about how you set up your ladder stands. Last week I dropped an episode on stand set up. It’s mostly about portable options, and I talked about you know, facing away from the action with your hang on with ladder stands. It’s almost impossible to get people to consider this, and the reason is simple. You want to see deer coming, you stand up and you know, shoot them off the stand, kill your buck, easy, peasy, simple linear. That’s great, but you have to consider that if you do the work to hang a ladder stand, you are very likely to hunt it a lot. I mean, that’s kind of the understated selling point of this style of a stand. It’s rock solid and always there waiting for you to just slip in and hunt. But volume hunting any location is a great way to burn it out, and when the deer start to realize that the stand is a major source of danger, they’ll treat it differently. This only gets multiplied when you consider that most of us are going to put up ladder stands in spots where lots of deer should go, like food plots and field edge corners, just high traffic areas. That’s great, but that’s also a great way to educate a lot of deer in your press. It’s in that specific spot. What’s worse is that long after you leave, those deer will give that ladder a good sniff and start to put a pattern onto your hunting strategy. Add in the deer that wins you and see you, which is just inevitable at some point, and you have a recipe for real stan burnout. Setting up a ladder stand to be a little more hidden, maybe on the backside of a tree, can help you get bonus points if the ladder ends up in a spot deer just aren’t likely to walk up to, Like if you leave some brush around and only leave a small trail to get to the actual ladder. This is extra work and a hard thing to measure, but it doesn’t hurt to try to minimize the amount of deer that will put a nose to the places you put a hand or a boot. It’s also a good idea to get yourself a roll hockey tape to wrap any of the parts of the stand that might cause noise. A lot of stands use a d loop kind of locking pin like you might find on a trailer hitch for a boat, and while those things are handy, they aren’t tight fitting and are very easy to bump, you know, with your boot, toe or whatever on your way up. Wrapping some hockey tape around them is an easy fix, and that stuff can be used to silence pretty much anything you want. Any metal point on the stand you might bump with your bow can be wrapped up pretty easily. Again, this might never be the difference maker, but it’s cheap insurance and if you do end up needing it when your target buck is closing in, you’ll be happy you did it. You should also really really pay attention to how much play is in your ladder when you set up the stand. A little play in August is a lot of play in November, when it’s sixty degrees colder and the woods are pin drop quiet. At the top of the stand, you’ll encounter a few things you should really pay attention to as well. A good seat cushion is really important, not only for comfort but for staying quiet. This is because your harness has some metal buckles on it, which could scrape on metal seats. That’s no bueno. You’ll also realize that, even though you know this, you’re often really exposed in a litelatderstand. They just can’t as easily be tucked into a multi limbed part of a tree quite like a saddle or a hang on, and that means they are by nature way more visible. I really think deer learned to associate danger with trail cameras and tree stands in high pressure areas, and nothing is easier to spot than a big old ladder stand. Any cover you can give yourself at the top, it’s just cheap insurance. Don’t trim so much that you are totally exposed, because you’re very likely to start getting picked off. Some folks will use camo netting to hide themselves, and while I’ve never done it because I don’t hunt fro ladder stands enough to worry about it. I guess it does make sense. But if you can also just hinge cut some limbs and keep them around the base and sides of your platform, you’re gonna have a little extra cover. The key to hiding from deer if you can’t put a tree trunk between you and them, is to really break up your outline. We all know this, and we’ve been told this by camo companies for a long long time. Doesn’t make it unsure, you got to think about it. A deer that sees a whole human sized blob of camo and a tree on top of an unnatural metal thing strapped to that tree is a deer that might not end up wearing your tag. A little bit of brush and leaves in whatever to break up your outline is never going to hurt your cause. When I set up a ladder stand, I really like to make sure that the base of the stand where the platform is also has some brush and limbs around it to help when deer get close. I also really like to have some brush behind me so that when they look up they can’t quite distinguish what is going on. You know, you get that and it’ll maybe a little bit of wind, and it can do wonders for getting away with more movement as well. Now, while this might seem like a no brainer, it’s a really good idea to get your ladder stand set and then take a three hundred and sixty degree walk around like you would with any stand, to see how visible you’ll actually be. Then take a walk along the trails in other spots where the deer most likely to show up. How does the stand look and how do you think you’ll look when you’re in it. Now, here’s the thing. None of this stuff is necessary for you to kill a deer from a ladder stand, and it might just seem like kind of extra nitpicky work. But it’s these details we can account for ahead of time that might come into play when a really good buck does show up, and at that point you won’t be sad that you took some extra time to really nail down the little things with your setup. This is also true if you put your dad in the stand and he’s old enough to think about giving it all up, or you put one of your kids in that stand, you know, and they’ll move all over every minute, especially when a foroky walks in and they need all the help they can get. The details matter, and if you’re going to go this tree stand route, the details will eventually come into play at some point. Think about them and do your future self a favor and think about coming back next week because I’m going to talk about bachelor groups, how to find them, how to keep tabs on them, and how to put a plan into place to actually kill a buck out of one of them. That’s it for this week. I am Tony Peterson. This is the Wire to Hunt found Foundations podcast. I want to thank you for your support. You guys show up for us. You know, whether we’re dropping new bibs from the Bear Grease lineup or whether we’re dropping a new film. You’re always there for us. We truly appreciate it. 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