How to Pick a Hunting Property in 30 Minutes With OnX

I have a rule about e-scouting. If I can't find three spots worth walking in half an hour, the property isn't the problem. My method is.

Thirty minutes is plenty. It's plenty because most of what's on the map is noise, and the filters that cut the noise are boring and mechanical. You're not looking for deer on a screen. You're looking for terrain that makes deer predictable, and access that makes other hunters lazy.

I use OnX because that's what's on my phone and I've paid for it since 2017. HuntStand does the same job. So does Basemap, so does GoHunt for western units. Nothing below depends on the brand. It depends on the order you turn the layers on.

Minutes 1 through 10: delete most of the map

Public land layer on. Zoom out until the whole parcel fits the screen. Now find every way in. Every gravel pull-off, every gate, every two-track, every boat ramp. Drop a pin on each one. Don't skip the ugly ones, because the ugly ones are the ones locals use.

Then measure a half mile out from each of those pins. Everything inside those circles is a coin flip. I've hunted a lot of public in southern Illinois and I have almost never found a hang-on bracket, a boot track in frost, or a spent ThermaCell cartridge more than about 800 yards from somebody's truck. That's not a knock on anybody. Packing a saddle a mile in the dark before work is a hard sell. But it means the half-mile line is the single most useful thing on your map, and it takes ninety seconds to draw.

What's left after that is usually 20% of the parcel. Good. Now you can actually look at it.

Minutes 10 through 25: find the funnel, not the food

Food changes. A cut bean field is a magnet in October and a parking lot in December. The soybeans get rotated, the acorn crop fails, somebody plants brassicas across the fence and your whole plan evaporates. Terrain doesn't move. Bet on the thing that doesn't move.

Switch to topo and hunt for four shapes. Saddles, which are the low notch between two high points and are the only place a deer will cross a ridge if he can help it. Benches, the flat shelf partway up a slope where a buck can bed with thermals rising into his nose and his eyes on the bottom. Creek crossings, which are almost always a specific twenty-foot stretch of bank and not the whole creek. And inside corners, where cover pokes into open ground and a deer gets to stage without stepping out.

Then do the thing most guys skip. Run the historical imagery slider. Drag it back seven or eight years and watch what changed. A clearcut or a timber sale that's four to eight years old is the thickest bedding cover on the property and it looks like nothing on current satellite because the canopy filled back in from above. My buddy Ryan found the best spot he's ever hunted that way. Current imagery showed unremarkable timber. The 2018 image showed a 30-acre cut. He walked it in July and it was a jungle, and he shot a 4.5-year-old off the downwind edge of it that November.

While you're in there, tap the private parcels around the boundary and read the owner names. Half the value of a public piece is the 40 acres of standing corn next to it. That's a name, an address, and a conversation in August. The worst thing that happens is somebody says no.

Minutes 25 through 30: pick the wind, then be honest about the shot

Three spots. Each one hunts a different wind. If all three want a northwest, you have one spot and two backups you'll never use, and the first warm south wind in October puts you on the couch.

For each one, draw the entry route before you draw anything else. Along a creek, along a field edge, through the ag, whatever keeps your scent and your boots out of the bedding you just found. If the only way in crosses the funnel you're hunting, that's not a spot. That's a place you'll bump a deer once and then wonder why it went dead.

Last thing, and this is the part nobody does at the kitchen table. Use the line tool and measure the actual shot. Not the distance to the trail. The distance from where the tree is to where the deer will be standing when you have to make a decision. Do it for both sides of the tree.

You will be surprised. The bench that looked tight on the topo is 47 yards across. The creek crossing is 22. And the difference matters, because a 47-yard shot from 20 feet up at a deer quartering away is a completely different problem than 22 flat, and July is when you find that out. Not November.

That's where the map hands off. Once you know the real numbers, go run them. Put your build into the Shot Solver in The Forge, set the treestand height, dial in the angle and the yardage you just measured, and look at what your arrow is actually doing when it gets there. If the answer at 47 is thin, you now have three months to either move the tree, tighten your groups, or decide that side of the stand is a pass. All three of those are fine. Finding out at full draw is not.