Finding Your Own Micro-Wilderness

Retreat from our retreat. A beautiful day.

The Path Less Traveled

Hunters, hikers, backpackers, and fishermen face increased pressure on public lands. With the advent of ATVs and UTVs, more people are finding their way deeper into the outdoors. I feel this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is good to know that so many more are enjoying the outdoors. On the other hand, my own private paradises aren’t so private anymore! Enter, micro-wilderness.

I’m speaking right now of finding your own private hunting areas; but you should also seek to use these principles and ideas to find better outdoor adventures of all kinds. By working harder to get away, I promise you will find a greater sense of adventure and likely more peace, quiet, and beauty.

We all have our own idea of what is meant by the word “wilderness”. I want you to become familiar with what I consider to be micro-wildernesses. These are the small roadless areas cut off by topography, private land, or just sheer oversight.

Maps

When I was a kid, I used to pore over maps, looking for cool places to go and roads to take me there. As I’ve grown older, I realize that I’m placing higher value on areas that are overlooked by others. Simple Gazetteers are helpful to get you pointed in the right direction. USGS 1:100,000 scale maps help you to refine your approach, showing you 4WD drive roads, springs, and better-quality roads. Many of these show public lands and some show large tracts of forest and trees.

I used to own a serious set of 1:24,000 maps to cover the country I hunted. I had dozens, rolled up and stored in my bedroom. Each hunt, I’d pull them out and put the right ones in my truck. Perfect for throwing over the hood or tailgate of a truck. Unfortunately, with all of the new access “roads” on the land from UTV/ATV operators, you can no longer trust just the 1:24,000 to show where motorized traffic might have access.

Online Resources

Maps and aerial photographs are your first line of attack. I use Google Earth™ and ESRI’s free ArcGIS account relentlessly, as core resources. Each have their own strengths. Together, these are all the tools you need, along with your sense of adventure, to plan your outing in your living room.

ArcGIS is a free Geographical Information System offered by ESRI. No time for a complete discussion here, but the big takeaways follow:

1. Access to both 1:100,000 and 1:24,000 maps. You can pan and zoom. Brilliant!
2. You can toggle between Bing color aerial photographs and topographic maps.
3. You can digitize your own polygons (think micro-wilderness), paths, and waypoints of interest.
4. Finally, you can search for and import useful layers like land status, game management units, waterways, and other interesting data posted online.

In a nutshell, I use a Gazetteer or my own knowledge of an area to start. I then open ArcGIS and look for areas that are favorable to my game species, using the aerial photographs. Once I locate a likely area, I flip to topo maps and I begin digitizing a layer (roadless area) that starts at the end of a road, flipping back and forth between photo and map, and keep digitizing until I close the polygon. Boom, I have defined a small area where no roads exist…micro-wilderness.

Our own micro-wilderness for the day.

I can repeat this process again and again. I usually try to focus on areas that are greater than two square miles, but sometimes all you need is a little area that gets overlooked by others. My team has smoked some nice drive-by bucks by looking in places that are too obvious to hunt. The thing is, we did it on purpose. It wasn’t like we got lucky. We went there that day to hunt an area that was “too close to the main road” or “not sexy enough”.

I also flag water sources, using stickpin waypoints. I did this recently to help my son score an 89 inch pronghorn. My tactic was to find every single water source in the area, using maps and photos. It took tens of hours to do, but when I zoomed out, it became easy to see where antelope might be.

Google Earth gives me another tool that helps me win during season. Using Google Earth, I can compare two habitats. If I’ve seen a lot of nice bucks in a certain area, then I fly around my hunting area online, looking for comparable circumstances. I can focus on north slopes more easily, or sagebrush-covered southern slopes.

If I want to backpack into an area, whether to fish, camp, or hunt, where trails don’t exist, I must understand where thick brush and bare ridge are. Google Earth can help you to turn a 2-mile, 3-hour hike into a 2.2 mile, 1.5 hour hike. Don’t believe me? Go give it a try. Pick a path in sagebrush, serviceberry, currant, buckbrush, and other alpine shrubs and hike it. Now find the least brushy path back and see what a difference it makes to your hike.

Google Earth helps you to get a better understanding of the real challenge the topography presents. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve plotted a path on a topo map only to find out it was ridiculously difficult in real life. Google helps that!

Smart Phones and GPS

GPS is a must in the outdoors. I’ve recently found that my Iphone™ is superior to most packaged GPS units. First, I can download 1:100,000 and 1:24,000 maps and both track where I am and create waypoints. Second, I can take pictures while afield. If you have cell coverage, you can also download photos in the field so you can see what is over the next ridge. Navigating to and from your micro-wilderness is so much easier with your GPS or smartphone set up properly. Use this tool always.

Finally, you can take pictures of your trophies, backpacking area, fish or whatever; however, don’t forget that unless you turn off the GPS completely or at least for the camera, you will be sharing your coordinates every time you share your photo! I once had a friend send me a photo of his B&C bull elk and he accidentally shot me his coordinates as well! He wasn’t too happy about it, but I never shared those coordinates and so he was lucky. I also had a scare of my own when I texted my 238″ gross mule deer buck photo from the field! Again, I was able to shut down any coordinate sharing, but man did my heart rate ever tick up…especially as I sent the picture I lost cell signal!

Wrapping Up

For you to compete on public lands, you need to be smarter than the average competitor. Micro-wilderness is the way I’ve been able to have increasing success as a hunter. Last weekend my wife and I saw 22 mule deer bucks from our tent within the first two hours of light. This weekend the tally was just shy of 30.

Both times, we saw far more elk than deer. In both instances, we backpacked into micro-wilderness and camped at our spotting location. Neither time did we hike over two miles to set up our tent. From experience, I am certain we could not have achieved the same great game-locating result by parking at the end of a road, or along a road. You have to get out and hike, even just a little, to set yourself apart from the others and find where the animals hide.