Contributors to this thread:
Have experience hunting "hill country" in western Maryland where I would describe the landscape as like a sheet of "bubble wrap" with different shape/size bubbles but the hills there are a fraction of the elevation change that you have in southern ohio it appears. In those steeper MD hills, I like to get on the downwind side of the top and let my wind go out over anything that is approaching from the downwind side, with the help of whatever little thermal pull the hills provide. The winds seem to be more consistent on the tops with the bottoms being more prone to swirling, which I think is a commonly known thing.
I see a lot of videos where guys out there are hunting down off the tops. Its hard to tell if they are hunting a bench off the leeward side or if they are more towards the bottoms. You guys that do a lot of Ohio hill country hunting, where do you prefer to hunt? Top of the ridges, those benches off the leeward sides, pinch points leading up onto the ridges? Funnels and pinchpoints are the obvious answers when the bucks are full blown cruising but we are going to be starting our hunt out there this fall before that stage hits. Are you targeting a certain elevation of a ridge towards the end of October or are you just hunting where the sign seems to be the hottest and doing your best to stay downwind of the deer?
Thanks in advance for anybody that offers any time/opinions!
Very tricky hunting the hills in Ohio...I try to hunt with the wind in my favor but it often swirls...I am lucky to know the property I hunt fairly well and what I can get away with and where. During the rut all bets are off I still try to hunt the wind but hunt hottest sign and rely on trail cams to pinpoint where I hunt. Last year I shot my buck on Nov 3rd down in a ravine where I really have no clue what the wind does but I got lucky. During the rut you don't know when or where a buck may come from so I say just hunt!
The property that I hunt in Ohio is dissected by a large watershed with a number of small drainages coming in from both sides. By and large the major drainage runs N and S. I try to match the thermals to the wind direction. If there is a east wind I usually hunt the west side of the main drainage and with a west wind I hunt the east side. If the wind is NW I hunt SE and if it is SW I hunt NE. I find that if I stay out of the bottoms of the smaller drainages I can ignore their effect. Then I just hunt travel patterns based on the part of the season. I try to stay out of all of my good rut movement stands early in the season and focus on bedding to food travel in the evening. Details vary based on the terrain and bottlenecks. I have a hill top bedding area with strip pits on the E and W sides of it and fields and food plots to the SE and SW. It is up hill to the N. The deer come off of the food in the morning and come around the pits to get to the bedding. Any wind with very much south in it allows me to hunt stands north of the trails. A lot of the terrain features are more subtle but I use the thermals and the wind to determine what areas can be hunted w/o swirling wind and terrain features and established travel route for stand placement and stand selection. Of course I may have a stand on the NE side that can only be hunted with a W wind and the winds normally work for that.
