The Twin Buttes Reservoir is a lake just a few miles from downtown San Angelo. It’s a medium-sized place as far as Texas lakes go—I would guess about the same size as Lake Granger just outside of Georgetown.

Public Hunting Access:

Twin Buttes PHL
Unit #502
12,858 acres
Split into 9 different units

Two of the units are bow-only and on the east side of the dam and spillway. There are four main access points to a set of rugged dirt roads that run all over the lake area. During the winter hunting season, the lake can be 20–40 feet below pool, and what looks like a lake on the map is actually a full set of trails that are primarily used by locals with dune buggies. It’s a really great large public hunting area.

There are plenty of deer—you just have to get real close, as no rifles are allowed. It’s shotguns with slugs or a muzzle loader.

This was the perfect place for my first e-bike trip. I was pretty nervous about riding around, especially since I forgot my helmet. Before I left, I was joking around that I was going to dig out the motorcycle body armor for the e-bike.

When I first made it out to the north side of the lake—where I knew the Jeep could not go, but the trails were perfect for an e-bike and went on for miles—I wasn’t sure what the regulations were about e-bikes, and the muzzle loader is also something that still makes me nervous. Anyway, I decided to take the bike out on the first test run without a gun. If all went well, I would go back to the car and figure out which gun I was taking and how I was going to strap it to me or the bike.

After just a few minutes, I was pretty comfortable on the trail. Most of the road is in pretty good shape, and the little spots that can get a car stuck were nothing to get over on a bike. Before I knew it, I was a few miles in and staring down this massive road in the middle of the wilderness.

In hindsight, I should have remembered that the very edge of the public hunting grounds is prime real estate. This road would have been a big hike for a hiker, but it was a 50-second roller coaster ride on my e-bike. I motored to the top of the hill like an idiot and then was face to face with about 10 shooter does, about 50 yards away in a clearing.

If I would have had the shotgun on my back in a proper sling, and been a little more careful riding to the good spots and getting out and hiking, the public land whitetail would have been mine that day.

Spooking it twice just ’cause it’s nice.

The video of me racing up the hill is from the second day of hunting the same area. Needless to say, as soon as I saw the deer without a gun, I floored the e-bike back to the Jeep and figured out real quick how to strap the muzzle loader to a backpack, and I was off into the wilderness. One gun was easy, and at one point I had both the shotgun and the muzzle loader on my back.

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Shotgun vs. Muzzle Loader

There are pros and cons for both while deer hunting. The muzzle loader is a superior option at anything around 75 yards and farther. It’s an ethical shot for a modest user of the weapon at 100 yards, but performance drops quickly after about 100 yards as gravity takes over and the bullet starts to drop.

The shotgun slug is deadly to 50 yards, and then its performance drops quickly as well. The ethical shot range of this one is about 70 yards at most.

The shotgun has three other obvious advantages. Mine can hold three slugs and is semi-automatic, it’s easy to unload, and I have some serious trigger time on my Browning 12 gauge, including a long track record of not missing birds and rabbits in the wild with it.

The muzzle loader, on the other hand, has one shot—and that one shot is both hard to load and unload. Legally, you’re not supposed to travel in a car or on an e-bike with it loaded. One can try to claim that if you take out the primer cap it’s not really loaded, but officially this doesn’t count—it’s still loaded.

You have to either shoot it (which makes you a total jerk to other hunters and ruins your chances), or you have to unscrew a component, carefully get the black powder out of the gun and back into the load tube, and then ram out the bullet. I desperately need to get this thing to the range, break it in, and get this process down to second nature—but that wasn’t done by this hunt.

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A Rabbit or Quail, No Matter What

You don’t need a PhD in marketing to figure out this video is way cooler if I harvest something. This was my third trip out here, and I knew where the rabbits were. There was also one cool hiking area that I had only half explored right next to it. Time to go after some rabbits—and maybe a quail.

For you non-hunters, you can shoot a rabbit or a quail with the same shotgun load, as long as it’s not a slug. With the e-bike down, it was time for some serious walking to put some game in the cooler.

I was pretty sore and beat up after the big rabbit hunt. The bike was down, and I went out for a nice meal and a few brews after the harvest. So Sunday’s hike was nice, but started late and ended early—victory style.

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