E-scouting

The e-scouting tools answer the questions you'd otherwise burn a weekend scouting: what does this country actually look like, where does the habitat argument say animals should be, and what can I see from that knob.

Everything on this page runs on open elevation data (USGS 3DEP through our own DEM tiles) and open math — no black boxes, no server round-trip. Your phone computes the same answer the website does.

3D terrain

The 3D button drapes the map over the DEM and tilts to 68° — past most apps' pitch cap — so a basin reads the way it does from a ridgeline. Vertical exaggeration is adjustable ×0.5–×3 (design default ×1.35): true scale for judging a pack-out, exaggerated for reading subtle relief in flat country. Sun lighting on the hillshade follows the real sun for the map center, so aspect shading matches the time of day you're looking at.

Terrain Lens

The Lens (in Habitat & terrain) shades every pixel that matches an elevation band, slope band, and set of aspects — the "north-facing black timber between 8,500 and 10,000 ft on 15–35° slopes" question, answered visually at 60 fps.

Presets cover the classic arguments (early-season elk, rut mule deer, bedding cliffs); every preset is editable, and the sliders write through to the same filter. Slope and aspect come from a central-difference (Zevenbergen–Thorne) stencil on the DEM — the same formulation gdaldem uses, and our implementation is cross-checked against GDAL's output in CI to within a twentieth of a degree.

Viewshed and line of sight

Pick the viewshed tool, click a glassing point, and the map shades what a standing observer there can actually see within 5 km — earth curvature and standard atmospheric refraction (k = 0.87) included, because at 3 miles the curve already hides ~1.7 m of elk.

Click anywhere else for a line-of-sight verdict: green when the sightline is clear, rust when it's blocked — with the blocking rise named and marked, so you know which ridge to move around. The sweep math is pure and tested against an independent brute-force reference; the golden suite lives next to the code.

Two honest limits: the DEM is bare earth, so timber that would really block your view doesn't; and visibility is computed at ~30 m posting, so a knife ridge narrower than that can leak.

Elevation profiles

Draw a route (or open a recorded track) and the profile chart draws grade-colored segments — sage to 10%, amber to 20%, ember beyond — with the steepest sustained pitch called out and a crosshair reading distance / elevation / grade. Gain is thresholded at the DEM's own vertical error so metre-scale noise doesn't add phantom climb to your day.

Offline

All of it works in offline packs: DEM tiles ride along, so viewshed, Lens, profiles, and 3D keep working with no service — the point of e-scouting is that the answer holds up when you're standing there.