With deer season under way here in Missouri, I started looking at some of my buddy Bruce’s gear and noticed that everything was camo except his boots. He bought a pair of  Danner 8″ Vandal GTX boots, which are black/brown. We started debating if there is a need to have a camouflage pattern on your boots. After hours of discussion (and a few frosty beverages), we came up with an answer.

A point that Bruce brought up was that people spend tons of money to get top rate camouflage patterns like Crye Multicam only to cover a good portion of it with a hunter’s orange vest. So if you are spending all this money to buy gear decked out in camo just to have to put a big flag on your back, he doesn’t see the need to worry about your boots.

Now Bruce is mostly a still hunter. He does not use tree stands, where I being the overindulgent lover of food that I am take the more energy-saving approach of sitting on my duff. Most of my time in the woods is spent in my favorite tree stand sitting 10 feet in the air. So, of course, my boots are going to stick out more. This being one of the reasons I personally have bought camouflage boots in the past. Caring about having camouflage boots in a tree stand does lead into many other topics like “Is the tree stand camo?,” “You know deer don’t usually look up,” and “Is a deer really going to care that the person aiming at them has the gull to be wearing non-camouflage boots?”

So our answer was that there really is not a black or white answer to this topic. It is more of a gray with scatterings of darker and lighter colors mixed in type of answer.

What’s your take? Do you care about the pattern on your boots? Let us know.