Nothing Like Deer Camp on the High Texas Plains - Hunting Big Free-Range Whitetails with Trijicon

There is something special about the rapid bump-bump-bump-bump of your truck's wheels rolling over the steel beams of a cattle guard at the gate of a sprawling Texas ranch. It is a transition point, the spot where your anticipation really starts peaking, especially when the gate is at a place like the Lowrance Ranch near Truscott, Texas, a well-managed haven for big white-tailed deer.

The ranch is located east of Lubbock and about 100 miles due north of Abilene. Arriving there for a November 2024 outdoor industry hunt sponsored by Trijicon was a bit like sliding back in time 45 years to the three years I served at Dyess AFB, a Strategic Air Command installation adjacent to Abilene. I’m not saying I’m old, but we still had B-52D models, the ones with a tail gunner, on the flightline when I was stationed there.

Ranch sign at gate

cattle out in an open pasture at sunset

Lowrance Ranch was established in 1954, when it was purchased from the Masterson family. Robert Ben Masterson, a towering figure in Texas ranching history, owned the land. The property has historic significance. Two structures were removed and donated to the National Ranching Heritage Association. One was a mail camp, a structure where riders and horses carrying the mail rested overnight. The other is the old stone JY Bunkhouse.

The ranch has incredible habitat for a variety of wildlife, ideal for hunting big, free-range Texas whitetails.

“Each corner of the ranch looks entirely different, ecologically,” says Colton Beam, ranch wildlife manager and nephew of its owners. “We’ve got river bottoms, picturesque West Texas canyons, high tops (eroded, rocky flats above the ridgelines) with shortgrass and in the low country riparian areas, you see a lot of mid- and tall-grass plant species. We’re being inundated with red berry juniper and honey mesquite. That’s the predominant brush on the property.”

The white-tailed deer and handful of mule deer in the territory are free to come and go, but the ranch’s size (about 43,000 acres) means many of them can live their entire lives on the ranch. Beam uses personal observations and an incredible array of 80 trail cameras to monitor individual animals. His aim is to ensure each buck has optimum opportunity to age to its full potential. Most deer taken by hunters are at least 6.5 years old; some reach 9 years old. Beam has been watching these deer since 2017. He estimates that he is familiar with at least half of the bucks living on the ranch.

“Some of these deer may have never seen a human being."

“We want to ensure the buck has reached its peak breeding potential and has bred as many does as possible and passed on his genetics as well as maximized antler production,” he explains. “Every buck is different. Some may peak at five-and-a-half years old, others not until they’re eight.”

The management goal for the whitetail herd is a 1-1 buck-to-doe ratio, or at least something close to it. Two different strains of white-tailed deer inhabit Lowrance, according to Beam. “This area, traditionally, didn’t have whitetails at all,” he says. “This was the southern rolling plains, with none of the brush and low mesquite and cedars you see today. It was 1956 that Texas Parks and Wildlife relocated a bunch of whitetails here from South Texas. Unfortunately, that winter had a very severe storm and many of those deer died. In 1958, they had a different idea, this time stocking deer trapped in Kansas. A plaque once stood saying, ‘This was ground zero for the reintroduction of white-tailed deer,’” Beam says. 

Trophy deer hunting operations in Texas are often high fenced, but not Lowrance. It is a low-fence, completely free-range type of operation, meaning deer migrate in and out from the adjacent, similarly huge ranches. One of those adjacent ranches is the massive 6666s operation, the one owned by Taylor Sheridan and featured in several episodes of the Yellowstone television series.           

Note: The reason I haven’t covered this hunt yet until now in this Outdoors Rambler weblog is that the stories were first running in Game & Fish magazine and Shooting Sports Retailer magazine. The Shooting Retailer piece ran earlier this year and it is loaded with information about the gear we used, especially the new Trijicon Huron hunting scope. I mounted it atop my Bergara B-14 Timber rifle chambered in .300 Win. Mag., a rifle I first took to Africa in 2015. The rifle was loaded with 150-grain Winchester Deer Season XP cartridges. You can read all about the gear at this link to Shooting Sports Retailer. The article in Game & Fish was published in October 2025 but doesn’t appear to be available online yet. The Trijicon scope was mounted at Green Top Sporting Goods in Glen Allen, Virginia. The grouping out of the box was fantastic!

So, here we are.

Our Hunts for Big, Free-Range Texas Whitetails

Success for me came on the third morning of the hunt. My previous three morning and afternoon outings were to three different blinds as Colton and my guide Eli Arends tried to anticipate the movements of the buck they hoped I would encounter, a big 10-pointer they had nicknamed Tres. As noted earlier, Beam closely monitors the deer on the ranch and some are given nicknames. I originally thought they were calling this deer “Trace,” but later learned that it was Tres – or three in Spanish, immediately calling to my mind one of my favorite ZZ Top albums “Tres Hombres.”

The first morning’s sit saw us at the edge of a pasture, with a deep, brushy swale to our left before it transitioned to thick cover of mesquite and shrubs. I saw three nice bucks that morning, all of them in exhibiting rutting behavior, looking for receptive does. In the afternoon, we were positioned along a creek bed with a pool of water. Rugged terrain loomed in the distance. But - no trace of Tres.

The third morning saw us in a comfortable blind well before daybreak. The territory to our left was flat and open. A little more than a hundred yards in front, the habitat transitioned into thick pockets of juniper and mesquite. Eli brought an excellent gun rest into the blind, and we set the rifle into the cradle. About 15 minutes before legal shooting, we could discern the shadowy forms of deer already in the area. Looking left, I saw a large buck steadily making its way toward the gathering.

“Is that Tres?” I whispered? Arends raised his binoculars, then nodded. The minutes ticking off to legal shooting time gave me a chance to curb my adrenaline, which had spiked as I began tracking the shadowy deer in the inky light. The buck seemed to disappear for a minute but, thankfully, reappeared just as “go time” arrived and began intently working a scrape below a juniper tree. Arends lightly tapped my arm. “We’re legal,” he whispered.

After briefly offering a straight-on, frontal shot, the muscular buck turned broadside toward a scrape, grabbing a licking branch in its mouth. I had dialed the new Huron scope up to 14, even though the deer was only 120 yards away. I settled the scope’s crisp crosshairs, flicked the safety forward, and squeezed the trigger. My shot in the faint light of daybreak created a chaotic scene, with deer leaping and fleeing. Maybe the 10-pointer had dropped where it stood, we wondered? We waited 20 minutes and went to check. Nope, but the frothy blood on the ground and in the junipers seemed to indicate a quality hit. The blood trail trickled to a couple of worrisome, minuscule drips 25 yards from the scrape. Not wanting to push a deer that might be fatally - but not particularly well - hit, we decided to wait a couple of hours. I tied a paper towel to a thorn bush, marking the location of the last blood. I began feeling the dissonance you experience when you start questioning your shot. We quietly backed out.

Returning to camp, we learned that Eddie Stevenson, who works outdoor media relations for Trijicon shot an absolute beast of an animal. Using the Boone & Crockett system, Beam green-scored Stevenson’s eight-pointer at an amazing 164 inches! Truly a buck of a lifetime.

While everyone marveled at Eddie's deer, Beam, Arends and David Faubion, another writer in camp, examined Arends’ video of my shot. When the video was slowed, you could see the bullet’s impact. The big buck had mule-kicked and burst to the left, behind the juniper thicket. Based on the video, it looked like the Deer Season XP bullet plowed through on a high double-lung hit.

“That deer has to be somewhere within 75 yards of where we stopped tracking,” I declared.

Colton Beam, left, and Eddie Stevenson with Eddie's monster eight-pointer!

‘There he is…’

We assembled a search team. With Beam in the lead, we picked up the spotty blood trail. “There he is,” several of us announced simultaneously upon spying the deer piled up in tall grass near a patch of scrubby mesquite and juniper. The buck wasn’t 30 yards past the spot where I had tied the paper towel to the shrub. The high, lethal hit didn’t generate the copious trail often seen with lower lung shots. In hindsight, and after looking again at the video, it was obvious that I aimed a little high, picking a spot just over the top strand of a woven-wire fence designed to deter the ranch’s abundant feral hogs.

I grasped the deer’s beautiful antlers, looked at my new friends gathered around and registered their words of congratulation. I was grateful. “I’m speechless right now – happy and speechless,” I said.

Estimating a mature buck’s age can be challenging. Having a series of photos dating to when a deer was just a couple of years old helps. In selecting “target” bucks, Beam also assesses other physical characteristics, such as the depth of the neck where it meets the chest. “It’s just like a Hereford bull,” he explains. “With a mature buck, there’s little to no difference between where the neck meets his brisket. The younger bucks will have more of an angle from the bottom of the brisket to where his neck meets the chest…I also look at the slope of its nose, length of his legs, and the slope of his belly, looking for a sag. If it’s straight across, he’s five years old or younger.”

Based on his records, Beam estimates my deer was seven-to-eight years old. “This year was, by far, the best rack he’s ever had,” he added. “Well, it’s the biggest buck I’ve ever shot,” I said.

Tagging Out

Faubion tagged out early, taking a symmetrical 10-pointer with a brow tine sticker on the first afternoon. Stevenson and I saw success on the morning of day three, with Josh Lyall, Trijicon’s marketing director, filling his tag at dusk the same day. His buck sported massive palmated antlers and the points and stickers associated with an old deer. 

Derrick Nawrocki pushed it to the wire on the final day, but sitting on a stand for his final attempt wasn't part of the plan. With just a couple of hours of hunting time left, most of the hunting party climbed aboard a unique elevated platform mounted above a truck. This is the platform the ranch often uses when hunting nighttime predators. The plan was to cover ground, with everyone on the lookout for deer. If a quality, mature deer was spotted, Nawrocki and Beam would dismount and put on a stalk – a hunting style often experienced in Africa. 

Success came quickly. Thirty minutes into the expedition, a hefty 10-pointer was spotted. This buck was obsessed with a feeding doe. With the vehicle stopped, we all watched Beam and Nawrocki slip along the edge of nearby woods to get within range. The buck eventually spotted our distant vehicle and began pacing back and forth. “Better hurry guys,” I mumbled. The buck’s reluctance to leave the doe sealed his fate. A minute later, Nawrocki was kneeling beside the deer. We were fully tagged out – with almost 90 minutes to spare. What a week of outstanding Texas deer hunting! 

Good Fun, Food and Hijinx

Tyler Beam, Colton’s brother, is a bourbon connoisseur and he ensures an admirable range of offerings are available for either an aperitif or a post-dinner sip while sitting around the fire pit. Speaking of the fire pit, it is the site of a wide range of hunt camp activities, from quiet storytelling to practical jokes.

While rattlesnakes are a natural part of the landscape, they can present obvious hazards to humans and livestock. They are often seen on sunny days, even as late as the November hunting season. David Waldrip, a gregarious cattleman from the San Antonio area, is one of the hunting guides and support team at Lowrance. The day before I shot my deer, Waldrip had encountered a snake and, shall we say, rendered it harmless…mostly.

Now, once a hunter tags out, the pressure immediately slackens, meaning you’re able to enjoy an extra drink or two around the evening fire. The crew had assembled in the comfortable Adirondack chairs, and the fire was warm and inviting on the night that wrapped up our highly successful third day. I was a little late to the fire pit and one of the guys fetched me from the ranch house. Conveniently, there was one chair still open in the circle. I plopped down and took a couple photos of the fire while the conversation flowed. Suddenly, David Faubion, sitting to my left, urgently warned, “Ken, Ken, hey!” while simultaneously tapping my arm. I looked down and saw a snake sliding beneath my chair. I hurriedly lifted my legs and had a split-second panicked moment, until I heard the laughs of everyone around the fire. Waldrip, standing opposite me, had rigged the dead snake with fishing line, hiding it in a corner behind me until he could stealthily make his sneaky move. Very funny guys! Veerrrryy funny.

Delicious Food and Then Some...

The fire was also the setting for a special end-of-hunt evening. Cameron W. Bradfute, who works in crop insurance from his New Braunfels home, is one of the hunt camp’s master Texas chefs. He cooks a mean brisket, or fajitas – everything really. He is also a bit of a historian and folklorist. Stevenson knew Bradfute was also a skilled teller of cowboy stories and poetry and he asked him if he would share a few verses with us on this last night at Lowrance.

While the other guides were rocking it out to music in the building where the deer are processed, all was quiet around the fire as Bradfute lyrically resurrected cowboy legends of yesteryear. You know, I think that, for a few minutes, we were all cowboys, sitting there in the Texas night, realizing with a bit of sadness that this all-too-brief adventure was winding to a close.

Cameron Bradfute shares cowboy poetry

Note: For more about Lowrance Rance, see www.lowrance.ranch.com or contact Colton Beam at cbeam.lowranceranch@gmail.com. The 2024 season was just the fourth for Lowrance in terms of booking hunting groups. They keep things manageable, taking no more than five-to-six hunters each week, mainly booking corporate groups. We’re not your typical Texas ranch,” Beam says. “We want your hunting experience to be special, something that really shows what this ranch has to offer.”  

Oh, and a hunt at Lowrance doesn’t have to end just because you tagged your deer. The real fun, Beams noted with a smile, often comes after your deer is hanging in the cooler. “Then it’s time to go hunt the pigs, bobcats and coyotes, often with thermal optics.”