One thing that has become drilled into my head as a new hunter, something I experienced firsthand this year to the nth degree, is that if you're not finding your quarry where you are, don't be afraid to move. We can get stuck in how good a place looks, how awesome a trail is, or the idea of "How the hell aren't the elk/deer/antelope/bear/moose/sheep right here?!"
But, as Admiral Ackbar says so eloquently, "It's a trap!"
Animals move, they migrate, they roam. And if we're too rigid in where we're sitting or hiking, we might never actually see our chosen game. And, honestly, I've seen this occur twice in the last 12 months. Once at Doug Durren's farm in Wisconsin, and another time in the mountains of Utah, hunting elk. The latter of which I wouldn't have been successful in tagging out had I not just up and moved.
Yet, that's a lot harder of an option when you're hunting whitetail in a fixed deer blind in the Midwest, East, or South, as is most often the case. Those blinds are heavy and an absolute pain to move. But what if you could just back up your side-by-side, hook it up to a hitch, and then drive away to a new primo spot? Well, that's exactly what Greylight Blind's Nomad Trailer has worked out, and it looks slick.
While there's a good number of folks who use ground blinds that are more easily set up and taken down, the vast majority of whitetail hunters use static hard or soft-sided blinds that have some height to them. But those are a pain to change areas, often requiring the use of heavy machinery. When I was at Durren's last year, they were used heavy loaders to move blinds around. Not everyone has access to those, however, and what happens is you end up with only changing the blind's spot when your buddy with a skidsteer has a free weekend, which is maybe once every three years.
The Greylight Blind's Nomad trailer, however, works like a normal trailer that just hooks up to your side-by-side's hitch, and connects to your blind's tower structure, making it so you don't have to tear anything down before moving the whole kit and caboodle. As for construction, it's all steel and weighs in at 548 pounds without the blind attached. Dimensions for the trailer measure 96 inches wide and 93 inches long, though it's 118 inches with the trailer tongue included.
As of right now, it works with Greylight's Transformer 6’ Tower, which hooks up to either the company's Daybreak or Twilight blinds. Obviously, however, it's not for highway use, as the wheels are 18-inch tubeless tires designed to go over semi-rough terrain and not to the local Fleet Farm to pick up some corn.
Pricing for the trailer ain't bad, coming in at $1,500. You do have a flat-rate heavy load tax on it, so add an additional $450 for shipping. But again, hunting is all about adapting to the conditions. And if the conditions aren't right and you've just set up a blind you don't want to move again, then you're basically just twiddling your thumbs and not actually hunting. This, possibly, would solve that.
