Whitetail Archery.

A three day guided archery hunt on our own Henderson County ground costs $1,500, lodging and meals included. You hunt stands and blinds your guide has been running cameras on since summer, and one child hunts free with every paid adult.

Illinois archery season opens October 1 and runs, with two short firearm breaks, all the way to January 17. That is a long window, and the early part of it is the most underrated hunting we have. Deer are still on a summer to fall food pattern, they are predictable, and the pressure across the county is close to zero.

Your guide sets you on a stand or a blind chosen from cameras that have been running on that farm since July. We hunt field edges, interior timber funnels and the CRP travel corridors between them, and we move you rather than burning a stand out. If the wind turns wrong for a setup, you are not sitting in it.

Three days is enough to hunt three genuinely different pieces of ground. Most hunters take a morning and an evening sit each day, come back to the lodge for a meal in the middle, and go back out. Nobody is rushed off a stand and nobody is asked to shoot a deer they do not want.