Arizona Hunting Club & Outdoor Adventure Group

Learn How to Utilize Prevailing Winds
and Heat Thermals to Hide Your Position

Hunting with the Prevailing Wind in Your Face

The most frustrating part of hunting can be the wind. Regardless of how much planning you do based on weather forecasts, wearing scent block suits and making sure your clothing and person are scent free, your body's scent will still get picked up and blown by the wind.

Regardless, all hunters that kill trophy game animals every year, are experts and predicting and defying the wind by using cover scents, knowing an area well enough to know how the wind will blow based early morning, noon and afternoon wind thermal conditions.

Predicting the wind isn't as hard as it used to be. Weather.com and numerous other weather forecasting services can predict hour-by-hour weather conditions and wind shifts. So there is no excuse for not knowing which way the prevailing wind should be blowing during the majority of the day.

Hunting Heat Thermals

And while you may know the weather forecast, it is even more important to know the area well enough to select areas to hunt where the wind will be more predictable than not, such as the tops of hills versus down in a draw where the wind will mostly swirl and switch directions all day long.

On ridge tops, flat plateaus and other types of high ground in hilly regions, the wind generally stays constant. Knowing this, you can listen to the weather radio and get a pretty accurate forecast of which way the wind will be blowing in these spots all day. This will allow you to choose an entry route to a tree stand, and remain there all day undetected by deer and elk for hours.

Good areas to look for on high ground include inside corners, saddles, hill top funnels and converging hubs where a number of game trails crest the top of a hill. With a little thought and great patience, you should be able to work the wind in each of these positions and maximize your success rate.

Heat Thermals Can Provide a Hunting Advantage

On a calm, cool and sunny morning, the side of a valley in a hilly region will heat up, creating an upward thermal. A good example of this is the Mogollon Rim. Knowing that warming thermals will continue to blow your scent up hill, you can plan to walk down numerous ridges and drop down onto the top of many hills overlooking well-defined game trails such as the Highline trail. Your scent will be lifted up and away from the deer and elk walking on the trail below you for three to four hours.

The same conditions will work great for a morning hunt in a hill top funnel. Entering from a grassy pasture on top of a plateau, you can hunt a tree stand that overlooks a draw following a well-traveled creek bed. Because the day is calm and warming, the air within the gully will warm and flow up the streambed and blow your scent right back into the field you crossed to get to the stand.

On warm sunny days that calm in the evenings, you can use the same technique to approach the same game trail from the creek bed below since the air will begin to cool and push the airflow back down into the gulley toward you and away from the game trail.

Wind Vacuums Can Provide a Hunting Advantage

Many hunters will tell you that hunting on windy day is a waste of time. Most of the time they would be right, but sometimes a steady or a prevailing wind all day can be used to your hunting advantage. This means a steady wind, not wind that is gusty.

Sometimes when a steady wind blows over the top of a hill and there is a vacuum in valley below, and the wind will curl back towards the hills in the same way that water curls back into an eddy behind a big rock in a river. In this scenario, you would think that the wind would blow your scent down into the valley below. But when you travel more than half way down the hill you might learn that the wind is actually blowing back up the because of the vacuum or eddy created by the strong wind blowing steadily across the top of the hill and down into the valley.