About 4 years ago, I walked into a stand that was about 650 yds from my truck. With clean boots kept in tote in the back of my truck, I first went directly to a puddle and ground the soles into the mudfy bottom. Then went to my stand.
The stand was on a swamp edge and the last 5 yds of my approach was bare ground, dirt.
I got up in the tree.
About 4 hours later, a small 4 point came through and his nose was on the ground the entire time when he moved. (Pre rut was on).
When he crossed my walk in, he stopped dead in his tracks, apparently smelling the soles of my boots. He turned abruptly and scurried off right back where he had came from.
It was then I realized, once and for all, total scent control is futile...
This was not a coincidence... the buck could smell my walk in after a 600 plus yard walk in and 4 hours of time lapse...
The only time that boots should be stored in a sealed container is when those boots have been deodorized on the
inside of the boot. When boots that have been previously worn (and contaminated on the insides with odor) are kept in sealed containers, you are actually storing them in a closed environment of human odor. The inside of the boot will contaminate the outside of the boots.
When I come back to my truck from a hunt, I never put my boots back in a closed boot bin. They are left in the open air until I thoroughly dry the insides and also treat the insides and outsides with ozone. I also routinely ozone the inside of the boot bin.
One other point...never use a bare foot, or stocking foot to push boot off your other foot. Never pull off a boot with bare hands. When you do either of those things, you've now contaminated the outside of that boot. I know for a fact that a single fingerprint has enough odor for a deer to detect. Touching boots with bare hand or a bare foot is a mistake. Some boots are difficult to remove. resist the urge to grab it with your hands or use the other foot to push it off. Boot-on-boot is okay, but otherwise, never use anything that contains human odor to grasp or remove a boot. A boot jack is a handy little tool. Some styles of rubber boots are almost impossible to pull off without a jack.
My success rate with not having trail busts is pretty much 100%. I cross deer trails on almost every hunt with very minimal busts. I'm not saying deer don't smell the ground disturbance or that they don't smell any of my odor, but the level of the reduced odor is to the level that it does not alarm them.
It's probably the biggest point that gets ignored in these odor discussions... it's not the odor itself, it's the
intensity of the odor that we can influence.
One more thing...Not all rubber smells the same. The next time you are in a boot store, pick up each pair/brand of boot and sniff the bottom. Some have almost no rubber smell and others have a horrible stench. I won't buy a boot that stinks before I've even worn it.
