Most people who blow through a game check station aren’t doing it because they forgot to read the sign. They’re doing it because they’ve already done the math on what’s waiting in the back of the truck, and they’ve decided to take their chances.
That’s the setup in a new episode of Wardens from WILDLANDS, Season 6, Episode 3. A pickup runs straight past a check station near Dillon, and the wardens who give chase end up looking at deer blood in the bed. What starts as a simple failure to stop turns into something a whole lot more interesting.
If you hunt southwest Montana, you know why a check station near Dillon makes sense. Beaverhead County is deer and elk country, with the Pioneers, the Tendoys, the Ruby Range and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest all funneling hunters onto a handful of highways heading home. Traffic on I-15 and Highway 41 swells every fall, and a lot of it is loaded with meat. That’s exactly where FWP wants a warden standing with a flashlight and a few friendly questions.
And here’s the part that gets lost in the drama: in Montana, check stations are not optional for hunters. If you’re signed to stop, you stop. Blowing past one is a violation on its own, and wardens will tell you it’s one of the fastest ways to turn a routine contact into a full investigation. Even if everything in your truck is legal, driving through a station gives the officers reasonable cause to wonder why you didn’t want to talk. Spoiler: the answer is rarely “I was running late for dinner.”
The blood is the other piece worth thinking about. Every season, plenty of lawful hunters have a bloody tailgate, and wardens know it. What separates a legal harvest from a problem is the paperwork and the details: a valid license and tag, the proper tagging of the animal, evidence of sex attached where required, and a story that lines up with what’s physically in the truck. If you’ve ever packed out a deer and wondered why the warden asks so many questions, this episode shows the thought process behind the curiosity.
Montana’s poaching problem is real, and it’s often the quiet kind: an extra whitetail, an animal taken without a tag, a deer shot after dark from the road. Those cases rarely get cracked by a dramatic chase. They get cracked by an observant officer, a check station, and someone who made a bad decision at the wrong moment. That’s what makes this clip worth ten minutes of your time.
Watch it, then do yourself a favor before opening day: check your tags, know your hunting district’s rules, and if you see a check station, pull in. It takes two minutes. The alternative, as this video makes clear, can take a lot longer.
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