bowhunter15 wrote:pewpewpew wrote:bowhunter15 wrote:I think some of it depends on what the hills look like. Do you have long narrow ridges or condensed hubs with points going in all directions? In the latter, the wind is only truly "leeward" in a few spots. A deer could cross from one bedding to another in a few minutes, so if he's doing a lot of cruising it stands to reason that he's not always going to travel on the leeward side. Most of the areas I hunt are like that. We don't really have long, narrow ridges. We have more networks of shorter points going in many directions.
I was actually just messaging Jeff G not too long ago about access. He prefers to always access from the top. In some areas, bottom access is the only option, but you can turn a low access into a high access. Walking up to the spine of a ridge or hub allows you to travel to a leeward bowl and then drop down to hunt between two leeward bedding points, often with doe bedding either up top or down in the bottoms. So in those scenarios a buck might not be traveling far. He may just Hop from one point to the next but use a certain elevation to do it. I've been using the slope-angle shading on Caltopo or Gaia to get a better idea for where the military crest is when cyber scouting. It's often much clearer than just looking at topo lines. And then you can predict where that cruising elevation might be.
In that image above that I pulled from a random spot, you can see how the slope angle shading makes it really easy to predict where a cruising elevation might be. And even though there isn't much for a lee-ward ridge in terms of total distance, those point would correspond with lee-ward buck bedding. And you might expect does to be higher up on those points if there's enough cover or down in that drainage. But what you see between those two points is that ravine, where likely there will be some sort of natural pinch point that the bucks will cross around. So I would drop into the region of that red circle and look for the sign indicating that trail. Now imagine an entire hub:
There can still be that leeward movement from one area to the next, but if a buck really wants to check that entire area, there will have to be times when he's not on the leeward side. He could travel that elevation along multiple points, he could shortcut from low spot to low spot or through a saddle, or maybe he would even drop down the spine of a ridge and move to the next hub over. But either way, the hard terrain funnels become the spots to focus on because they're funneling the movement. And the more bedding on either side of one of those pinch points, the better.
Your images are pretty much exactly the terrain I’m working with.
If accessing from the top, I really like the fact that you are really only penetrating the timber a short distance. Depending on the undergrowth, access might be quiet and quick. The challenge I face is bumping feeding deer in the fields in the AM. My other challenge is a draw that is just not steep enough to really funnel deer hard. In my area, I find very few that a deer can’t jump across or climb if they really wanted to avoid being funneled.
In Brad Herndon’s “Mapping Trophy Bucks” he illustrates this exact set up, except with wind blowing up the draw, into the hunters face, and into the field behind the hunter. That seems like a bulletproof setup, but is hunting windward to much of a sacrifice?
Would you hunt a setup like this outside of the rut? Or would this be strictly a cruising time thing?
Outside of the rut I would work from those pinch points and try to sneak closer to the points in an attempt to get close enough for daylight activity.
I haven't put enough sits in windward vs leeward drainages to be able to really speak to the total difference. I would assume that during the rut it doesn't matter as much, but outside of the rut you might not have a buck bedding on the windward point. One thing to keep in mind though is that late evening, the thermals will start dropping, and your scent will start sinking down the valley even if you're on the windward side (unless you happen to have a strong consistent wind through the evening like if a front is moving through).
Good deal. Let us know, post-season, if this set up was productive for you.