You’ve put in for and you’re close to drawing a coveted tag in a unit you’ve dreamt of hunting for years. Suddenly, you see on social media the state game agency is drawing down funds from successful applicants’ credit cards. You spend all day neurotically checking your credit card statement on an hourly basis when suddenly you see a pending charge in the amount you’ve been hoping for. You wouldn’t dare tell your spouse and kids, but this just might rival the day you were married or when your kids were born. After calling and texting every hunting buddy you’ve ever known, you immediately start e-scouting to formulate a plan for putting your feet on the ground.

Before you ever lay eyes or boots on your hunt unit you need to know how to access it and move around the landscape. No need to go into this further, it’s pretty simple. You need to know how to get to those places you want to scout and hunt.

Getting away from the competition is always an advantageous strategy for big game hunting. Thousands of these wilderness areas are scattered throughout the West where roads, motorized travel, and other activities are restricted to protect ecological integrity and important habitat. Knowing where wilderness areas are will help you make an informed decision on how to get away from the crowds and get to places where more animals will be.

It’s no longer a secret, recent forest fires are a magnet for big game. Young growth of woody and herbaceous plants are higher in many minerals and proteins than old-growth vegetation. Big game are making a nutritional decision when feeding in recent wildfires. Follow them.

One of the first things hunters look for when hiking a new area is where water is located. Water is essential to big game and your hunt. No water, no animals. It’s that simple. Knowing where water sources are is essential to piecing together the jigsaw puzzle your hunt will become. BaseMap has a water layer to give you an idea of where rivers, wetlands, creeks, and other water sources may be.

Public/private land patterns play an integral part in your hunt strategy. BaseMap has the absolute most up-to-date land ownership available from state agencies. Use it to find hidden slivers of public, or if you are hunting private land, know where every boundary ends.

Your hunt will most likely take you to places where phone service is unavailable or you may want to turn your phone on airplane mode to save battery. No worries. Once you’ve built some maps for places to start hiking use BaseMaps high-speed offline map downloads to store those maps of offline use. BaseMaps downloads are 5x faster, download multiple maps at once, and auto-store maps to the BaseMap cloud (map vault), all while multitasking in the app.