Free Hunting MapScouting with lidar, hillshade and aerial imagery
Use terrain and imagery together. Terrain helps explain slope and drainage; aerial imagery helps explain visible cover. Neither tells you whether a route is legal, passable today or used by wildlife.
Start with the broad landform
Open Topo in Layers and trace ridges, saddles and drainages. Turn on Hillshade to see how relief connects across the area. Free Hunting Map uses USGS 3DEP elevation for this shading. The available detail varies with source coverage.
Hillshade simulates light on terrain. A dark band can be a shaded slope, not a ditch. Try to confirm a suspected feature with contour shapes and the surrounding terrain. The USGS 3D Elevation Program explains the elevation source.
Compare cover and water layers
Layers also offers 2025 land cover and tree canopy, 2024 vegetation type and height, forest type, 2025 USDA crops and wetlands. Compare SSURGO soils, ecoregions, contours and elevation tint with the imagery. Use opacity and legends to read one dataset at a time. Dataset dates and geographic coverage vary; a mapped class does not establish today’s conditions.
Compare cover in aerial imagery
Switch to Satellite without changing your area of interest. Look for openings, edges, roads and wet areas. Leaf cover, shadows, image date and resolution affect what you can see. An apparent trail could be a drainage, skid route or imagery artifact.
Use the Trail finder as a field-check list
The experimental Trail finder uses lidar and elevation processing on your device. Open Trail finder, choose Draw box, select two corners and run Find trails. The selection is limited to two square miles and four kilometers per side.
Coverage is limited to the supported WI_Clark_2018 and WI_12County_9_B22 surveys in Wisconsin. New analysis needs network access and can take time on a phone. Results are ranked and marked Unverified; saved candidates remain available offline. These are derived suggestions, not an official public trail network, wildlife detections or evidence of legal access.
Make a short scouting plan
- Choose a few features you can compare on topo, hillshade and aerial imagery.
- Verify ownership and access with the managing agency.
- Drop named pins with the question you want to answer on the ground.
- Walk the area, record observations and revise the plan when imagery and reality differ.
Prepare the relevant views using the offline checklist. For basic contour reading, see the topo guide.