Over the past couple of months, we’ve received a number of questions about the lodging situation here at Hadley Creek Outfitters and what our hunters can expect when they arrive. In order to address these questions, it might be helpful to provide an update on lodging and a general overview of our current operations.
Whether you’ve hunted with us for years, or you’re looking into a Hadley Creek Hunt for the first time, here’s what you can expect this season on a hunt with us.
Here at Hadley Creek, we’ve placed a distinct focus on providing a very intimate experience for each of our hunters. This year, we will run three lodges that average about 8 hunters each. The largest of these facilities will provide enough space to host large groups when necessary. But the overall focus will be on small lodge sizes and a high-quality individual experience.
We are also placing a very high priority on the quality of meals and other amenities at each of our three lodges. This season, hunters can expect great home-cooked meals. We will fire up the grills on a regular basis and do our best to create a fun, friendly atmosphere for everyone at the lodge.
As always in the past, hunters will enjoy excellent room accommodations with comfortable beds and fresh linens. Each lodge has plenty of community space to relax and swap stories after a day of hunting, plus some of our world-class taxidermy.
When it comes to the hunt, you can expect to see the kind of quality that comes from more than 20 years of careful trophy management. And that’s the opportunity to kill a truly special, free-range whitetail buck. If you’re not already familiar with our operation, here are some things you should know.
First, our guides don’t hunt our properties. We get this question frequently. On the contrary, our guides are paid a bonus when you kill a trophy whitetail deer. In addition to a bonus incentive, the atmosphere among our guides is very competitive. They work incredibly hard to put hunters on deer every single day.
Hunters are usually assigned a different guide on each day of the hunt. Unless you request to go back with a specific guide, you will have the opportunity to hunt a different farm each day. This has been a very popular system among our hunters. It ensures that each hunter has equitable opportunity. And it facilitates some great competition among our guides!
Each of our farms is a nice mix of timber, crops and food plots. Since we are a full-time farming operation, we are able to control the layout and operations of our farms with a distinct focus on hunting. Having a line of commercial farm equipment also means that our food plots are impressive. These factors combine to give us superb advantages. Unlike many hunting outfitters that rely on leased farms, we control the operations of our farms. This greatly contributes to the quality of our deer and the success of the operation.
Another great contributor to our deer quality is the fact that we enforce a 140” or 4-year-old minimum on all deer hunts. We are one of the few free-range whitetail outfits willing to show pictures of the deer we kill each and every season. Check it out for yourself and take a look at our recent photo galleries.
When you look at our trophy photos, you can clearly see that we don’t try to pass off old photos as recent. In the past 15 years, our hunters have taken more than 150 deer over the 170” mark. As a 100% free-range outfit, we’re very proud of our deer quality, and our ability to consistently put big deer on the ground every season.
For more information on hunting here at Hadley Creek Outfitters, or details on current availability, please give us a call at 217-335-3804 or send us a message. We would love the opportunity to host you on a memorable whitetail hunt in Illinois!