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Three Rivers Ranger District, Colville National Forest
Location: northeast Washington
Size: 483,916 acres
ZIP: 99141

West across the Columbia River, Game Management Unit 101 in Colville National Forest’s Three Rivers Ranger District in Ferry County offers an excellent opportunity for bowhunters. Most of Washington’s mature buck harvest comes during the late firearms season, which ends just before the peak rut and the onset of late archery season in mid-November. But Unit 101 doesn’t hold a late modern firearms hunt. As a result, bowhunters can look forward to more bucks and less disruption, and they get to hunt the entire rut. Three Rivers Ranger District tends to be more arid, and the forest here is more open-and thus more suited to the tree-stand hunting bowhunters in the state seem to prefer. “Those archers do take a higher percentage of nice big bucks,” Zender says.

Scott Bestul
Scott Bestul

Trained as a high school English teacher and coach, Scott Bestul left that lucrative field to pursue another—as a full-time freelance writer in 1990. He sold his first story to Field & Stream a few years later and has been contributing to the brand ever since.

Public Lands & Waters