My best stand went dead on October 24th, 2022. I know the date because I wrote it in the notes app on my phone, sitting in it, watching nothing.
Two weeks earlier that same tree was the best thing I owned. A funnel between a bedding ridge and a cut cornfield, with a creek crossing that pinched everything into a fifteen-yard lane. I killed a doe out of it opening week. I saw the buck I wanted twice — once at 80 yards, once at 45 and turning. So I hunted it. Then I hunted it again. Then I hunted it on a marginal wind because I was sure, and by the fourth week of October a stand that had been showing me eight deer a sit was showing me squirrels.
The deer didn't leave. They were still there — I ran a camera 200 yards north and had them on it, in daylight, the whole time. They just stopped walking past me.
Pressure isn't about how many people are in the woods
Everybody understands public-land pressure. Trucks in the lot, orange in the timber, guys crashing in at 6:15 with headlamps blazing. That's the version people talk about.
The version that kills more hunts is the one you create yourself, on 40 private acres, hunting alone. You walk the same entry route. You leave scent on the same brush. You climb the same tree, and you get busted at last light and you slide down out of it and blow deer out of the field on the way to the truck, and you tell yourself it's fine because they didn't see you. They didn't have to. Deer read pressure through their nose and their feet, not their eyes. A mature buck that finds human scent in the same 40-yard corridor three times in ten days doesn't leave the county. He just quits using that corridor in daylight. Which for your purposes is the same as leaving.
Mark Kenyon and the Wired to Hunt guys have hammered this for years and they're right: the single biggest advantage most hunters have available — free, no gear purchase, no new lease — is simply hunting a spot less. Doesn't matter what your kit costs. If you burn a stand, you burned it.
One stand is a bet. Two is a plan.
A backup isn't the tree you go to when you're bored of the good one. It's the tree that lets the good one rest.
Here's the practical test I use now: I don't hunt a stand two sits in a row. Ever. If I sat the creek funnel Saturday morning, Saturday evening I'm somewhere else, even if somewhere else is worse. Because "worse" for one sit is a lot better than "dead" for the rest of October.
And the second stand can't be twenty yards from the first one. That's not a backup, that's a re-hang. A real backup has:
A different entry route. This is the one people skip. Two beautiful stands that both require you to walk the same field edge in the dark is one stand with extra steps. If I can't get to it clean, on foot, without crossing the bedding side of the property, it's not a backup.
A different wind. The whole point is that you can hunt something on a day you'd otherwise stay home or force it. My creek funnel is a NW stand. My backup is a bench on the south side that plays a SE. Those two cover about 70% of the season and neither one ever has to be hunted on a marginal day.
A different deer behavior. The funnel is a travel stand — it works when deer are moving. My backup sits over a white oak flat, which works when they're feeding and lazy and the wind is wrong for movement. Different reason to be there.
Three, honestly, is the number. Morning tree, evening tree, rut tree. But if you've only got the time and money to hang one more this year, hang the one with the cleanest entry, not the one with the most sign. Sign tells you deer were there. Entry tells you whether you'll still be hunting them in November.
The part nobody wants to hear
You are going to have a Saturday where the wind is wrong for both stands, and you are going to hunt one of them anyway, and you'll rationalize it, and you will be right about 30% of the time. I still do it. I did it last year and got winded by a doe I never saw, at 7:10 in the morning, and sat there for four more hours in a spot I had personally just ruined.
Discipline in October is worth more than any broadhead you'll ever buy. That's the whole post. Sit the spot the wind allows or don't sit.
And when you finally do get the shot — from the backup, on a Tuesday, because the wind turned and you had somewhere to go — the arrow needs to be right. That part isn't luck and it isn't discipline. It's math you can do at your kitchen table.
Go run the shot you're actually going to take. Not the 20-yard broadside off a lifted stand. The real one — 31 yards, quartering away, you're 22 feet up in an oak with the deer below you. The Shot Solver in The Forge will tell you the true horizontal distance, where the entry has to land to reach the far lung, and whether your arrow has enough left at that angle. Build the setup once, save it, and stop guessing from a treestand at the worst possible moment.
Hang the second stand. Rest the first one. Do the math before you're up the tree.