Arizona Hunting Club & Outdoor Adventure Group

Arizona Hunting Tips - Learn How
to Find and Hunt Deer/Elk with a Topographic Map

All hunters should start planning their hunting trips several months before the season opens, especially if you are a bow hunter. Unlike rifle hunters that are mobile and can make shots at 300-400 yards, a bow hunter usually hunts from a tree stand and needs to be within 50 yards of a game trail or a stock tank to prepare for a good shot.

The only way to get that close to a bull elk or a nice trophy buck is learn where they like to eat, drink and sleep.

Sounds simple, but when you drive to the end of a dirt road, park your truck and walk around in the woods for a couple of hours and then wonder why you didn't see anything and you'll begin to realize that it takes a little effort.

Your choices are simple. You can walk around all day and hope you stumble on some areas that hold some animals by accident or you can use a topographic map to mark out the exact GPS coordinates of where water, food and shelter can be found in close proximity to each other.

Not only will topographic maps show you where stock tanks, grassy pastures and hillside benches are located, but more importantly, they will show you the terrain obstacles that lie between each of these resources, which will cause animals follow take certain predictable routes on a regular basis.

Animals always follow the game trails that offer the path of least resistence and the best security cover to obscure their movements during daylight hours.

If you can learn to locate these features on a topographic map; program the coordinates into a GPS unit; and use this knowledge to explore the areas that you think will hold deer and elk, your hunting success rate will go up 1000%.

Even if the areas you have marked as waypoints to scout don't produce the results you want, you are bound to come across fresh tracks at 3 out of 10 stock tanks. From there you can follow game trails that will take you closer and closer to where the animals are feeding and bedding.

Click on each feature to learn what to look for on a topographic map:

1. Scouting Benches
2. Scouting Breaklines
3. Scouting Field Saddles
4. Scouting Game Trail Hubs
5. Scouting Funnels/Chokepoints
6. Scouting Hilltop Field Funnels
7. Scouting Inside and Double Inside Corners
8. Scouting Ridgeline Points
9. Scouting Saddles and Dips in the Ridge

There are several ways for you to begin searching for topographic maps that cover your hunting unit. You can each search our database of Arizona Stock Tank Scouting Reports, Arizona Hunt Unit Quadrangle Maps and our Arizona Stock Tanks GPS Coordinates Database that give the exact location of every water source in a given hunt unit.

Or if you know a summit, stock tank, meadow, creek or any other geographic marker name, you can search for it by enter the name and searching for it using the form below: