Arizona Hunting Club & Outdoor Adventure Group

Learn How to Scout Hunt Units
with 3D Satellite Terrain Mapping Tools

By far the best way to hike around in the woods and get a good idea of the terrain that you will be hunting in a given hunt unit is to use a product like Microsoft's Live Search or Google's Virtual Earth.

Both of these programs allow you to use a satellite to zoom into almost any place on earth and see what the foliage and ground cover looks like. You can easily find open meadows in the middle of the forest using this technique. The same goes for stock tanks, which show up as white circles.

Make sure you download the 3D model. The software does take a while to download, but once downloaded, you will be amazed at how well you can fly above the terrain and see everything from a bird's eye perspective. It is the perfect way to look for secret pastures and grassy fields in the middle of the forest and find secluded stock tanks that most people will never find. Put the cursor over a stock tank and look in the bottom right-hand corner and it will give you the exact GPS cordinates.

Once you find a hidden stock tank with secluded feeding areas, then you can even hold the control button down to spin the map 360 degrees and look at the stock tank or pasture from every possible direction.

Want see the ridge top saddles, benches, and the tops of drainages near the pastures and tanks where deer and elk might bed down? No problem. Tilt the map a little and it will show you more or less elevation. It will show you where the saddles are and which ones will run from the top of the mountain all the way down to the meadows and tank.

A good example is to look at the Washington Park area on the Mogollon Rim. There is a massive pasture up there with several stock tanks and several apple orchards. There is no other way to locate these landmarks like this without accidentilly stumbling across them unless you use this 3D satellite terrain mapping software program.

Next, tilt the map a little, you will see there is a natural ravine that runs from Washington Park down through Pyeatte Draw across highway 260 and into Hells Gate Wilderness area. Many people talk about this natural travel corridor that elk and deer have been using for hundreds of years, but when you use this tool you will see why the animals use it. It forms a natural travel corridor from their summer time range to their winter time range.

If you look closely, you can find areas where the saddles are very narrow. These spots are excellent ambush spots.

If you learn nothing else from this course, please download this software and try it. You can scout for hours and hours and hours from the comfort of your home office chair. All you need to do is find the spots, note the latidude and longitude coordinates and program them into your GPS unit. The forest is thick in these areas, but your GPS will lead you right to the spots you found on the map.