Arizona Hunting Club & Outdoor Adventure Group

Deer and Elk Stock Tank Photographs

Stock tanks are the key place to start your scouting efforts in order to find both deer and elk in Arizona. During the hunting season most animals will wait for the cover of darkness before getting a drink of water.

However, backtracking game trails and rub/scrape lines can help you follow the animals to their bedding areas. Even better, after locating the stock tank with the most tracks and fresh dropping, you can use a topographic map to predict where they are bedding down such as areas of high benches on the downwind side of a mountain or hill that overlooks their food and water resources.

This pictures show the kind of tank you want to stay away from. It is out in the open field and it has no green grass at all growing anywhere around it. As a result there are no trails leading toward it and no tracks of any kind in the mud.

This stock tank has much better potential. It has thousands of tracks around it and if you look closely, you can see the grass growing around the edge of the tank that has been grazed to the ground. The tank also has 5 different game trails leading to it from feeding area below the tank and numerous benches up on the hill above it. We also found a salt lick that was licked almost to the ground. Great signs for a hunting spot.

This stock tank is also an awesome spot. It is very near a giant grassy field and several drainages that cut through the middle of the field lead to this tank which is surrounded by heavy timber. The tank has tons of green, green grass.

You can't see the whole tank, but there are tracks all the way around it. This tanks always has water in it and is located deep in the forest. It lays just above the canyon and numerous drainages from the canyon lead to this tank. The tank also has a creek that runs beside it and down the hill. Like the other four blind tanks, it has tons of green grass that looks like a golf course because of heavy grazing.

The next two tanks have many of the same things in common. Green grass and fresh wallows where the elk have been peeing and rolling in the mud. You can see the scrape marks in the mud where the elk have been tearing things up withe their horns.Both tanks have lots of tracks and heavy grazing.