Hunting Club vs Public Land: Why Chris Jones Left His Lease and Started Finding Bigger Bucks

This post is based on our podcast episode with Chris Jones of Blue Collar Bucks. Watch the full 2-hour conversation below, or read on for the key takeaways.

When the 220-acre bow-only lease Chris Jones hunted in Pacolet, South Carolina sold out from under his club in the middle of October, his hunting buddy asked the obvious question: when do we start looking for the next lease?

Chris's answer: "I'm done with clubs. I'm going to public."

That first January, he walked 83 miles scouting public land. In February, 70 more. Five years later, he consistently finds and hunts three to five mature bucks per season on public ground — bigger deer, he says, than he ever found on club land.

"There are select clubs that can consistently hold a large number of amazing mature animals. All the public can consistently hold amazing mature animals."

Why Public Land Holds Mature Bucks

Chris's argument comes down to three things: size, habitat, and pressure. Big public tracts give bucks room to age — "If you don't kill them, they keep getting birthdays." And the pressure most hunters fear is concentrated in pockets near roads and gates. It falls off shockingly fast as you get deeper. On weekdays in bow season, Chris says he has 15,000 acres to himself.

The 2-Mile Rule

Chris doesn't hunt just any public block. He looks for tracts with a hard border — ideally a major river at the back — and eliminates any piece crisscrossed by roads. His standard: he only commits to blocks where he can get at least two miles from anywhere you can park a truck. Better yet, he parks on the far side of the river, stashes chest waders on the bank, and crosses. Almost nobody follows him over.

His #1 Terrain Feature: The Peninsula

If Chris could only hunt one setup, it would be the last ridge or finger that juts out into a river bottom. Before he ever leaves the house, he drops a pin on the tip of every one on the tract. Bucks hold elevation and cover as long as possible while moving from pine ridges down to river-bottom bedding — and the transition zone, where planted pines give way to beech trees and natural cedar, is the kill zone.

His e-scouting process runs in layers: leaf-on aerial imagery and topo to drop pins, LiDAR to refine them, then a walking track connecting every pin in a loop back to the truck. "The topo will never lie to you," he says — vegetation, weather, and pressure all change, but terrain doesn't.

Scrape Cameras Go Up in Late August

In upstate South Carolina, mature bucks open scrapes from mid-August through early September. A torn-up late-August scrape with a wrist-thick licking branch twisted off means a mature buck is announcing himself — and a camera goes up immediately. One scrape produced pictures of three different shooters within six days in the last week of August.

Chris runs a "wagon wheel" system — one cell camera on a major scrape as the hub, card cameras radiating out on travel routes. But once he's inventoried a block, he pulls about 90% of his cameras to stay out of the area. And a quarter of his cameras aren't for deer at all — they're aimed at access trails, monitoring hunter pressure so he knows which bottoms are truly untouched.

The Three-Heat Rut Most Hunters Miss

Chris's core breeding window runs Halloween to about November 7. But with a heavily skewed doe-to-buck ratio, not every doe gets bred — which sets up a real second heat around Thanksgiving and a third between Christmas and New Year's, right before the season closes.

"By that time, 98% of your public land hunters are at the house watching football, eating turkey. It is a ghost town down there."

Bonus: Hunt the Hurricane Blowdown

Two years after Hurricane Helene, upstate oak ridges look like somebody hinge-cut them at random — downed hundred-year-old oaks, many still alive with acorns five feet off the ground, and browse exploding in the new sunlight. Chris has jumped mature bucks bedded under downed live oak tops three times. His favorite new setup: the edge where blowdown abruptly stops and standing oaks resume — "just like hunting a clearcut, but the clearcut has live oaks with acorns."

Go Deeper

This is maybe a third of what's in the full episode — the Walmart buck story, the mentor who taught Chris to read the woods, sweet gum veins, privet thickets, and how he decides when to hunt a pin blind. Watch the full episode on YouTube or find it on your favorite audio platform.

Want to talk through your own e-scouting setups? Chris is an active member of our Circle community, where hunters share map reviews, tactics, and season stories every day. Join the community here.

And if you want to support the show, grab a hat before your next scout. Y'all Stay Southern.