Many of my wife's cousins live around Traverse City. They can tell you about snow, many times through the winter everything is shut down. The Upper Peninsula is really bad in the winter. The locals have told me there are no more deer up there because of the bad winters and high snowfall levels. The deer population has died off for lack of food in the winter.
Deer numbers are low up there because of some bad winters. Guestimates are around 100,000 deer in the herd.
Who ever told you there are no deer up there is wrong