Thursday November 5, 2025 It All Starts Out With Just An Idea

 

An idea to use an electric ATV winch to hoist deer to our meat pole during deer season prompted this rough sketch of using a 12 volt electric winch and deep cell battery. Its cable runs upward through a moveable snatch block hanging from a steel pipe mounted. The winch is mounted on a sheet of 1/2 inch plywood against the ground and uses 7 large logs as a counterbalance. We can stage five deer at a time for skinning and quartering, sliding the snatch block along the steel pipe wherever we need it.

   For the past twenty years or so, my wife Jackie's three sons, John, Craig, and Martin; Craig's son Josh, and more recently, John's son Ozaawaa, have been hunting whitetail deer here each November and having a fun time doing it. With the help of their varied contributions of money and material, I've built six deer stands for our use, built on four 4"x4" ten-foot legs that provide us an elevated field of view. Each stand has four walls, a roof, a door, several windows, and a portable 9000 BTU propane Buddy Heater. 

 

Me and Craig with Craig's nice buck, shot from John's Stand years ago.

 

   Our deer stands sure beat sitting in a tree or on a lean-to ladder-stand out in the open with nothing to block the cold wind except warm clothes, a face mask, or scarf, especially if it starts raining or snowing. I didn't use a stand for may years until I tried out a cousin's deer stand with sliding schoolbus windows in it, two comfortable swivel chairs -- and a heater. I was won over right then and there. Built me one the very next year not quite as fancy, and named it Steve's Stand, using telephone pole legs that are so big around they'll outlast me, and hopefully some high winds many years to come; the box seeing remodeling no doubt.

 

Melting into its environment and tucked back off a trail through the woods and a small meadow bordering Mikinaak Creek, Steve's Stand has long proved to be a reliably productive hunting platform. It's ten-foot elevation allows me to slowly move about inside it without being seen by deer. 

    I've written about building, erecting, and moving deer stands in several Wannaskan Almanac posts since 2018, so I won't belabor you again with all the details, except to say that five of the six stands are named for each of us as merely locations, rather than exclusive ownership or use. The Privy Stand, however, is named for what it started out resembling.

 

   John, Craig, and I are among the oldest hunters; of course, I am the eldest at 74; John at 61, and Craig at nearly 60. Martin is 56; at these ages, all of us have physical limitations that youth didn't have. I remember talking to John last year after we had wrestled a couple deer to their individual meat hooks 9-feet off the ground using block and tackle mounted on the horizontal 2x8 we call the meat pole. True, I had a winch on my four-wheeler that we use to pull the deer in from the field. It could do the job too, but I had to run the engine to power the battery.

 

   I think I said, after catching my breath, "You know, an electric winch here would be nice ...." 

 

   As I say, "It all starts out with just an idea," and as deer season was approaching this year, I sketched my idea on a piece of yellow ledger paper to flesh out what it was I would maybe need to implement this potential labor saver. I sent images of what I was doing to a friend of mine in Roseau, no spring chicken himself at 55, who thought it was a good idea, remembering a winch he had never used that was still in a box in his garage.

 

   Coincidentally, I discovered the L&M Fleet Supply in Tuff Rubber Balls, Minnesota, had a  Superwinch 12-volt DC electric winch, rated at 2000#, on sale the last couple weeks in October, for $99.  Hooyah! Things started to take shape. My ATV proved advantageous too. It can carry a bunch of stuff, like extension ladders, and tools.

A 2011 Polaris Sportsman 500 HO 4WD

 

 

 

   I drove several 1/2" x 36" steel fence posts through the plywood to keep the sheet and logs from shifting and added more logs than this for weight, planning to use concrete blocks next year. I turned the battery perpendicular to how this appears, and mounted a 40" wooden upright beside it that held the rocker switch and a toggle switch in a convenient place. I made a fairlead mount from steel scrap then covered the winch and battery against the weather. I sprayed this portion of the winch cable florescent orange and used marking flags at the corners of the winch base for safety reasons, as we will be moving about near it under the meat pole skinning and quartering our deer.

  In between time, I still had to re-disk a couple miles worth of firebreaks against wildfire danger this spring. They had grown up into grass to an extent that, as dry grass, risked fire danger themselves; I needed to turn them over to kill it. 

 

I must have mowed our big yard five times mulching the tons of leaves that descend upon us each fall; blowing them into the woods using the lawn tractor or harnessing the strong winds to do it as not all the trees drop their leaves at the same time.

 

I hauled several hundred gallons of creek water to all the smaller trees in the yard this summer and fall, including the three planted sugar maple trees. They responded beautifully.

 

Disking 25' wide firebreaks with my small equipment takes awhile but is a pleasant task.

 

   I'm thankful that I can still do manual work and not hurt terribly afterward. Using a handheld Stihl brush cutter FS131, I widened this narrows through a swale, four feet by 100-feet, in just a few minutes. This north-south section of firebreak is a half mile long.

 

   Firebreaks help protect these stands of thousands of White spruce, tamarack, birch, and Blue Grama Native Grass that we planted in 2012. Their colors provide depth of field and variety to the otherwise flat landscape that solid plantings of spruce or pine do not, as well as offer concealment and safety for deer and other animals.

 

These yellow tamaracks are actually deciduous trees that look like conifers. They turn gold in the fall and their needles fall as winter comes on. Right, Palmville School  District 44 West one-room school. 

 

An evening's expanse.

   

We finally got over two inches of rain in October, just enough for reflection on Mikinaak Creek.

                                             It All Starts Out With Just An Idea. Carry them out.