The Cheap Hunting Gear Worth Buying (And What to Splurge On)

Every August I get the same question wearing a different costume. Is the Sitka stuff worth it. Should I get the Swaro or the Vortex. My buddy says I need a $300 stabilizer.

So here's how I actually spend money, after fifteen seasons of buying the wrong thing first.

Pay real money for glass. Pay real money for anything that keeps you off the ground. Pay for boots if you walk. Everything else, buy the cheap one and put the difference into tags and gas.

The stuff worth real money

Binoculars. This is the only piece of gear I'll tell you to spend a mortgage payment on, and I still won't tell you to buy Swarovski. The floor is about $500 — a Vortex Viper HD or a Maven B6. Under that, the last twenty minutes of legal light turn into guessing, and the last twenty minutes of legal light is when the deer you've been waiting for stands up. I've watched more hunts fall apart from bad glass than from a bad bow. A $2,700 EL is genuinely better than a $500 Viper. It is not five times better.

Safety harness. Full body, lineman's rope, and a lifeline on every single stand so you're clipped in from the ground up. Call it $200 all in. My buddy Ray put his weight on an iced-over stick step in November 2021 and the only reason he walked out is that he'd finally quit being lazy about the lifeline three weeks earlier. Buy this before you buy a single accessory for your bow. I don't care if your bow is a hand-me-down Diamond.

Boots, but only if you actually walk. If you're sitting a stand 300 yards from the truck, a $90 pair of rubber boots is fine and you'll be warmer in them than in $400 leather. If you're grinding elk country, spend the money. Crispi, Kenetrek, Schnee's. Blisters end hunts, and no amount of arrow tuning fixes a guy limping back to camp on day three.

The stuff that's mostly marketing

Camo pattern. Whitetails are dichromats. They see blue extremely well and can't do much with red or orange, which means the optical brighteners in your laundry detergent light you up harder than the wrong pattern ever will. Wash your clothes in something UV-free and buy whatever's on the clearance rack. A merino base layer, a wool mid, and a quiet outer shell will beat a $1,400 head-to-toe system worn over a cotton hoodie. The one place I'll spend is on the outer layer for western hunts, because rain that soaks through at 11,000 feet is a different kind of problem.

Stabilizers. A stabilizer is a lever arm with weight on the end of it. That's the whole technology. A $60 Bee Stinger Sport Hunter with the right weights on it does the same job as the $280 carbon setup with the fancy dampener, and if you can't feel the difference between them at full draw you're not being cheap, you're being correct. Buy length and mass, not brand. Spend the $220 you saved on arrows or a tag.

Knives. A $30 Outdoor Edge or Havalon with replaceable blades will break down more deer more cleanly than the $350 custom drop point somebody gave you as a wedding gift. Sharp beats pretty. Every time.

Rangefinders. Anything modern with angle compensation, under $250, is enough. A Sig 2200 or a Leupold RX. The expensive units buy you range you'll never shoot at and a slightly faster read. What you cannot skip is angle comp, because the 32-yard shot from 20 feet up is a 29-yard shot and your pin doesn't know that.

Calls. Twelve-dollar grunt tube. I've never once thought "if only I'd had the premium one."

The one nobody wants to hear

The bow.

Last year's model, on closeout for $600, tuned properly, will outshoot this year's $1,400 flagship set up by a shop in a hurry. That's not a hot take, it's just what happens when you watch enough people shoot. The flagship buys you a couple fps and a slightly nicer draw cycle. Tune buys you arrows that hit where broadheads hit.

Ray again. He showed up to a 3D shoot with about $1,900 hanging off his riser and arrows spined for a 60-pound bow. He was shooting 72. He'd been fighting a left tear for a season and a half and had convinced himself it was his grip. It wasn't his grip. It was three hundred grains of stiff going through a bow that wanted something else entirely, and a $19 dozen of the right spine fixed what $1,900 of aluminum and carbon couldn't.

Arrows are the one place where cheap and expensive both go wrong. The $40 dozen with sloppy straightness will group fine at 25 and open up past 50. The $200 match-grade dozen is real precision that whitetail hunters mostly can't use — you're shooting a nine-inch vital at twenty yards, not a spot at eighty. Buy the middle, get the spine right, and get your components matched. That's where the accuracy lives.

If you don't know what spine you're actually shooting, go build your rig in The Forge and look at what it tells you before you spend another dollar on gear. Put your real draw weight in, your real draw length, your real point weight. Then build the cheap version and the expensive version side by side and see how little separates them. Most guys find out their $19 problem has been sitting in their quiver the whole time.