BARABOO, Wis. — The Badger Army Ammunition Plant has long been a legendary place for bowhunters in the know.

Imagine a small, American suburb that has a few whitetail deer sneaking through the backyards; it's a common scene throughout the United States.

Now imagine if the same suburb were abandoned — a ghost town, if you will — for a few decades. Weeds, prairie grasses, brush, thickets and saplings grow thick from neglect and deer would wander the overgrown streets of cracked concrete.

The deer slip in and out of shabby buildings with broken windows and others bed down on sun-warmed cement patios of dilapidated houses.

That accurately describes Badger Army Ammunition Plant in Baraboo, Wis.

"We used to do drives, and it was nothing to kick up 75 to 100 deer," said Sherman Raschein, who has bowhunted the local Sauk-Baraboo area since he was a boy. He grew up 5 miles away from Badger Army Ammunition Plant and hunted there in the early 1990s when he was a university student.

"When you went in there you had to make sure you had plenty of arrows, because you had a lot of shots but almost all of them were at running deer."

"The Badger," as dubbed by locals, is between the nearby Wisconsin River and the Baraboo Range in a region composed of ancient quartzite outcroppings that speckle the southern upland forest.

Badger Army Ammunition Plant hunting
Hunters have called the experience of tracking deer at Wisconsin's Badger Army Ammunition Plant surreal, for they can hide behind buildings and atop ammunition bunkers.

The boundary abuts Devils Lake State Park. It is the same kind of country described by Aldo Leopold in his classic conservation book "Sand County Almanac." In fact, Leopold spent his weekends a few miles away at his cabin retreat.

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Copyright © James Card.