Deer season in Texas starts off the ground. Archery season opens October 3 this year and the general season November 7, and a great many hunters will spend it twelve or fifteen feet up: in a tree stand, a ladder stand, a tripod, or a box blind on legs. In the trauma studies, the most dangerous thing a hunter does all season is not fire a rifle. It is climb.
The count. At two Ohio trauma centers, half of the injuries hunters came in with were falls and 29 percent were gunshot wounds, and 92 percent of the falls were from tree stands. The study’s title says it plainly: Tree Stands, Not Guns, are the Midwestern Hunter’s Most Dangerous Weapon. Texas counts falls in their own column. In 2024 the state’s hunting accident report counted six falls from elevated positions, blinds, and tree stands, and the 2025 report’s examples read like a checklist: a strap that broke on a ladder stand, a hunter who was not wearing a climbing harness.
The fall. The physics is the same as in The Harness. In the medical studies the typical fall from a stand is twelve to fifteen feet, and a fifteen-foot fall reaches the ground at about twenty-one miles an hour. What decides the injury is the stop. The average deceleration, counted in g’s, is the height of the fall divided by the distance the body travels while it stops. Fifteen feet of fall stopped in four inches of packed ground averages some forty-five times the pull of gravity, with peaks higher still.
The body. The ground takes that stop through the skeleton, usually along its length. In the Ohio study, 59 percent of the people who fell had spinal fractures, 47 percent had lower-extremity fractures, 18 percent upper-extremity fractures, and 18 percent closed head injuries; 81 percent of the fall injuries needed surgery, and 8.2 percent of the people who fell were left with permanent neurological deficits. In an Iowa series, the median fall was fifteen feet and 57 percent of the patients broke the spine. A fall feet first sends the load up through the heel and into the spine, which is why the heel fracture in The Harness comes with an order to examine the whole spine.
The harness. Texas’s hunter education course says a safety harness “should always be used to climb up (and down from) the stand and also worn the entire time the hunter is in the stand,” and that unloaded firearms and bows should be raised and lowered on a haul line, not carried up. A harness turns a stop against the ground into a stop in the webbing. It also brings a second danger: a person left hanging still. Federal safety officials warn that suspension in a fall-arrest harness “can result in unconsciousness, followed by death, in less than 30 minutes.” A harness is a plan that includes the way down.
Who answers. It depends on why the stand failed and whose land it stood on. When a strap snaps, a weld cracks, or a ladder folds, the question moves to the product: who designed it, who sold it, and what the warnings said. When it is the land, Texas has a statute written for exactly this. The recreational use statute, Chapter 75 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, lists hunting first among the kinds of recreation it covers. On agricultural land, an owner, lessee, or occupant who gives permission or invites someone to hunt does not, by that permission, “assure that the premises are safe for that purpose,” and owes no “greater degree of care than is owed to a trespasser.”
The statute has an edge. It does “not limit the liability” of an owner “who has been grossly negligent or has acted with malicious intent or in bad faith,” and Gross Negligence is the entry on what that takes. It also has a price test. For a private owner, the chapter applies only if the owner does not charge for entry, collects no more for recreation in a year than twenty times the property taxes on the land, or carries liability insurance in the amounts the statute sets. Whether a hunting lease counts against that limit turns on the lease and the numbers, so the lease, the tax bill, and the insurance policy belong in the file early. When the land is a ranch, the page on ranch and rural injuries covers the other people who may answer.
When the injury comes from another hunter’s shot, it is an ordinary negligence case against the person who fired. In 2025 Texas recorded 26 hunting incidents involving a firearm or a bow, and 7 of them were self-inflicted.
Gravity does not care whose land it is. The law does, and here it draws the line at gross negligence: an owner who actually knew of an extreme risk and went ahead anyway. Every shield in Texas law has an edge, which is the same point Sovereign makes about a tribe’s. The harness buys the stopping distance. The file finds the edge.
Season dates: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, 2026-2027 Hunting Season Dates. The count: TPWD Hunting Accident Reports, 2024 and 2025; Crockett and others, Tree Stands, Not Guns, are the Midwestern Hunter’s Most Dangerous Weapon, The American Surgeon (2010). Fall heights and spine fractures: Garrett and others, Common Injuries Associated with Falls from Tree Stands in Iowa, Wilderness and Environmental Medicine (2020); VanWormer and others, Injury (2016). The harness: TPWD Hunter Education, Blinds and Stands. Suspension: OSHA Safety and Health Information Bulletin 03-24-2004. The statute: Tex. Civ. Prac. and Rem. Code 75.001, 75.002, and 75.003. General information, not legal advice.
