With the exception of your tether supporting your weight all the time there is really not much difference in safety either way. Treestand hunters that are hooked to the tree from the ground up are just as safe as we are. Saddlehunters as a group feel safer and use extreme climbing methods at times that can be more dangerous but that’s not the saddle causing it.
Saddle hunting is growing in popularity and I feel it will continue to grow for several years. Mobile hunting was already growing and I have more company over a mile in the last decade or so. Many of the new mobile hunters don’t stay mobile long. A lot of hunters on public in my area just want to kill a deer. They don’t care much for trophy’s but are having difficulty finding deer close to the road. The truth is if you just want to kill a deer you don’t have to walk that far to do it. If you can’t kill deer a quarter mile off the road walking in 2 miles isn’t going to change much at all. Since starting my mobile journey I have actually decided my chances of killing any deer are just as high or maybe higher in an area with more hunters. You can be more likely to kill a mature deer a long way in. You can depend more on natural deer movement instead of deer being pushed around by other hunters. People who have been having difficulty closer to the road have this idea that deer relocate a couple miles to get away from hunters. It happens to some degree but most new mobile hunters quickly learn that they aren’t seeing any more deer way back in the woods than they were close to the roads. For the solo hunters any mobile treestand is easier to carry a mile into the woods than dragging that deer out. Then they start being mobile road hunters. Nothing wrong with that either. I find a lot of deer relatively close to the road protected by water crossings and thick brush that people find difficult to access. To me it’s so much easier dragging deer through a couple hundred yards of knee deep water than a couple miles of dry open ground.
Saddle hunting is growing in popularity and I feel it will continue to grow for several years. Mobile hunting was already growing and I have more company over a mile in the last decade or so. Many of the new mobile hunters don’t stay mobile long. A lot of hunters on public in my area just want to kill a deer. They don’t care much for trophy’s but are having difficulty finding deer close to the road. The truth is if you just want to kill a deer you don’t have to walk that far to do it. If you can’t kill deer a quarter mile off the road walking in 2 miles isn’t going to change much at all. Since starting my mobile journey I have actually decided my chances of killing any deer are just as high or maybe higher in an area with more hunters. You can be more likely to kill a mature deer a long way in. You can depend more on natural deer movement instead of deer being pushed around by other hunters. People who have been having difficulty closer to the road have this idea that deer relocate a couple miles to get away from hunters. It happens to some degree but most new mobile hunters quickly learn that they aren’t seeing any more deer way back in the woods than they were close to the roads. For the solo hunters any mobile treestand is easier to carry a mile into the woods than dragging that deer out. Then they start being mobile road hunters. Nothing wrong with that either. I find a lot of deer relatively close to the road protected by water crossings and thick brush that people find difficult to access. To me it’s so much easier dragging deer through a couple hundred yards of knee deep water than a couple miles of dry open ground.