Online Maps Can Help you Hunt
Lately, I've spent a bit of time searching for a certain spot in the Ocala National Forest. It's a place I hunted with Dad and another guy, on the last weekend of deer season, about 4-1/2 years ago. The woods have changed a lot since then; "controlled" burning of the woods having changed their appearance more than anything else. Also, several of the woods roads that were well-used at the time are now barely to be found, and others that were not used much back then have seen a lot more traffic in recent years. So when I recently started searching for this evasive spot, I had a heck of a time.
I was looking for a place where we found a large rut scrape in the road in early January (the rut peaks here in November!), and where I saw the largest group of deer I've ever seen in these parts. The deer don't "herd up" much in this forest. As a rule, you won't find more than 3 or maybe 4 together at a given time. But in this spot, as I climbed a pine tree in my stand on the last morning of the season, a group of 10 or 12 whitetails spotted me and took off. The problem was, we only hunted the place on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, and after the season's end we never made the trip to scout it out. At the time, I lived about 140 miles away, and didn't make many trips up here during the off-season. So, it faded in our memories, and then I decided I wanted to find it again. Here's what I did about it:
I knew within a mile or two where it was. We took one main road to another, turned right and went a ways (between 1/2 and 1-1/2 miles), then turned right again, on a "dim" woods road. So I had an area blocked out; now I started riding the area on my three-wheeler, up and down every dim road there was, looking for something familiar, and mapping the area with my Garmin GPS II Plus. I found that a great help in this was the Microsoft Terraserver. After finding the locality on their system, I noticed that the aerial photo I was using (the USGS image) was dated about 2 weeks after we hunted there, so I knew the roads would be in about the same shape in the picture as they were when we hunted there. This helped me narrow it down, and with Dad helping me remember, we think we've found the spot again. It'll take until October or November, at least, to find out what promise it holds for hunting, if any, but I feel like I accomplished something.
One great source is the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey), which partners with a number of online map servers these days. The USGS doesn't offer images outside the U.S., to my knowledge. Good luck scouting!
-Russ Chastain
