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Paige Darden MyTopo Huntress

Paige Darden MyTopo Huntress Paige is one of my hunt sponsors. She so graciously has helped me with maps when I’m writing for gohunt.com and sheet maps and other maps and she’s been a great partner for Whitetail Rendezvous so Paige, shout out to you and mytopo.com for helping me out, helping this guy out and that’s why I wanted to have Paige on the show today folks, because she’s got a lot of great information no matter where you are in North America, Topo Maps can help. Paige Darden MyTopo Huntress

My Topo’s just become sort of a go-to place for getting your hunting maps

My Topo’s just become sort of a go-to place for getting your hunting maps. We have topos, aerials, satellite, hybrid maps which is a topo overlay-ed on an aerial, and the savvy hunters call us up when they figure out where they want to go and order a map that focuses in on the area they’re gonna hunt. If you’ve drawn a tag you can get a GMU map any of the states in the western areas where you have the GMU units, you can just literally call us up or go onto our website and order a map of that entire GMU unit. Paige Darden MyTopo Huntress

In the eastern states most people hunt on a Wildlife Management Area, they’re state game lands, public areas all of those we have on our website listed. We have a couple hundred for every state and you can literally go in and those public hunting lands are already custom centered on a map, couple of clicks away you add it to your shopping cart and two or three days later you got it in your hot hands. Paige Darden MyTopo Huntress

Well, I tell ya I learned a lot from a guy name Brad Winke who’s, or Bill Winke who’s a great hunter out of Iowa I believe. And we used to have a great service with him that it got so popular we had to stop doing it. We couldn’t keep up with the demand. What he would do is people would say here’s the hundred acres that I hunt and tell me how to strategize this hunt. And we would provide the map and he’d provide the strategy, just being an expert hunter. But what he would do is show people how to figure out how game would travel through the land. Paige Darden MyTopo Huntress

what he would do is show people how to figure out how game would travel through the land.

You can look at the topo map and just like us, game is pretty lazy. They’ll take the path of least resistance. So you can figure out how they’re gonna get to their food sources, their water sources by taking the path of least resistance and ideally that offers a little bit of…sorry, we’ve got a train coming through it sounds like, but usually they will take the easiest path to get to their food and water as long as it provides a little cover.

When you’re hunting a smaller property you want to be careful not to let ’em know you’re there. So how you enter the property is super important, based on the wind direction and that kind of thing. So you want to be able to get into a property from all different sides of the property based on the wind direction that day. So he would talk to ’em about, he would write up that kind of strategy.

You also want to know their food sources. Where are the trees with the nuts and berries that the game’s gonna gravitate towards. Where are the likely bedding areas. All of those kinds of things if you can figure out by studying a map beforehand, it can sure, of course you have to do some on ground scouting as well, hopefully before the season starts. But all of that information kind of comes alive on a map.

What is the benefit of My Topo versus Google Earth?

Paige: Well absolutely, Google Earth is a great resource. We never discourage anybody from doing anything they can to stay sound and to help them be more successful. But My Topo also has a great free browsing service. If you just go to mytopo.com you’ll see where it says online maps is one of our heading topics and you can switch between a topo map, street maps to help you strategize how to get there, and then the satellite imagery. And you can toggle back and forth, you can zoom in or out and you can also get way points. Wherever your cursor is it’ll give you the GPS coordinate for that point. Then you can plug those into your GPS device or smartphone and have that data with you in the field.

So absolutely, anyway you can pre-scout we’re all for it.

There’s also great services, we offer one, a lot of the apps offer services where you can print out true to scale maps. And that’s one benefit over a mapping company versus an advertising company like Google is we actually pay real close attention to the quality of the output and so you want to be able to print out true to scale maps that you can rely on, on the ground.

So we have two services

So we have two services. We have a service where you can print out on your own computer 8 and a half by 11 or or 11 by 17 maps or you can order the nice large format maps that we print on our big plotters and send to you on the waterproof paper with waterproof inks.

And folks these maps are good. You can roll ’em up, you can fold ’em up, whatever you need to do. They’re resilient to the environment, I guess that’s a good way to say it.

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