The black veil of night slowly lifts from your forest surroundings. You exhale in the cold morning air, sending a cloud of frosty steam into space. As the cloud dissipates, you survey the area around your stand in hopes of catching a glimpse of a first-thing, opening-day buck.

A flash of color in the otherwise brown and gray forest catches your attention. It's another orange-clad hunter slowly picking his way along the ridgeline to your right. Your heart sinks at the sight of him.

Down the hill to your left, about 150 yards away, you spy another hunter assembling a tree stand at the base of a tree he obviously intends to climb. As you spin around in the stand you climbed into well before daylight, you quickly realize you are surrounded by hunters. And if there's a quicker way to burst the bubble of anticipation that builds for days leading up to opening day, I haven't yet found it.

When you're hunting public land, you can't expect to have the woods to yourself. Other hunters are a fact of life here, and they have as much right to be there as you do. But that doesn't mean you have to accept being boxed in by the orange army.

You have two choices when it comes to coping with competition on public land. You can either try to get away from the masses by seeking out the off-the-beaten-path places that hunters hate, but the deer typically love, or you can use the orange horde to your advantage. Make the hunting pressure work for you and hope it sends a buck scampering your way.

Here's a look at five alternative stand sites for pressured public land:

IN THE THICK OF IT
I like to think I'm a quick learner, but I have to admit it sometimes takes me longer than it should to figure out the obvious. There's a state park near my house that I hunted for quite a few years. Just about every year that I didn't tag a buck the first day, some friends and I would assemble at a buddy's house near the park to organize a few deer drives.

One of the first places we always hit was a rectangular patch of ground, about 40 acres in size, which had been timbered within the past 20 years. Once the trees were cut and hauled out of this area, it quickly became choked with brush. Anyone who ever set foot in that maze of thorny branches came out the other side bleeding or with torn clothing. It was nasty territory, but we always moved deer out of it.

After a couple years of this routine, it dawned on me that the resident deer herd obviously used this timbered patch as a sanctuary. If I could find a tree tall enough to get me in a stand just a few feet off the ground on opening day, I'd probably be in the proverbial catbird's seat.

That fall, I hacked my way into the thicket and found a stout, young black locust that offered a spot for my stand 8 feet above the earth. On opening day of gun season, as hunters moved all around the thicket, I could see tails bounding through the multiflora rose. Two hours after daylight, a 7-pointer came sneaking through the thicket on a deer trail 20 yards in front of me, an easy shot for my scoped 12-gauge.