Reading the ridge

Within 3 km of the waypoint

1,201 to 1,735 mLowest and highest ground.

Open ground

6%Shrub, tundra, grass and rock. The rest is timber.

Forest gives out at

About 1,880 m95 percent of the forest on the sheet lies below this height.

Steeper than 30°

4%Of the ground within 3 km, by the 30 m model.

What you can see from the waypoint

Your waypoint lies at 1,285 m on ground that faces east and falls away at about 6°. The highest ground within a kilometre is 1,493 m, 1000 m away to the east. The program classes the spot as valley floor. The sight lines say that someone standing at the waypoint has 10.0 km² in view, which is 5.0 percent of the ground within 8 km.

That figure is for bare earth. The waypoint stands in conifer forest, and 94% of the ground within 3 km is forest, so from the road you will see the trees in front of you and the skyline above them. What the map shows is which slopes face you: the ones to watch from a clearing, and the ones from which a truck or a camp can be seen.

Where to glass from

The glassing is on the ridge, not at the waypoint. The program tried a candidate every 180 m across the whole sheet, valley and ridge alike, let each one shuffle to the highest ground nearby, and counted the open ground it could see between 300 m and 3 km with an eye 1.7 m up and an animal's back 1.0 m up. Timber was left out of the count: you cannot glass into it. The eight best, kept at least 700 m apart:

Saddles: where the ridge is crossed

A saddle is the low gap between two higher parts of a ridge. Animals moving from one basin to the next take the gap rather than climb the crest, the wind funnels through it, and a hunter who sits where he can watch one has the traffic of two valleys in front of him.

These were found by flooding the elevation model from the top down. Each time two rising islands of ground join, the point where they touch is a saddle, and the height the lower island had reached above it says how much of a gap it is. Saddles are numbered outward from the waypoint.

Summits

Every top on the close sheet that stands at least 30 m above the gap joining it to higher ground. None of them has an official name, so each is called by its height, as surveyors do. Prominence is that height above the gap: a top with 100 m of it is a hill in its own right; one with 30 m is a knob on a ridge.

Where the prominence reads "over", the higher ground lies beyond the edge of the data and the true figure is larger.

The shape of the ground

Height

Steepness

Ground cover

Sun and thermals

On 5 Oct the sun rises at 8:07 and sets at 19:23 on a level horizon. At the waypoint, with the surrounding ridges counted, direct sun arrives about 9:48 and is gone about 17:58: 8.3 hours of it.

The pattern that follows is old knowledge. Slopes that take the first sun warm first, and air begins to rise on them; shaded slopes keep draining cold air downhill until the sun finds them. In the evening the order reverses. Plan an approach so that the air carries your scent away from where you expect animals to be, and remember that ridge top wind will often overrule the thermals altogether.

Wind and shelter

The wind on this ridge comes from the south-west more than from anywhere else. For every cell, the program looks into that wind for 300 m and takes the steepest angle up to the ground it finds. Where ground upwind stands above you, you are in its lee; where you stand above everything upwind, you take the wind in the face.

The lee is where animals lie up in a blow, and where you can glass without your eyes streaming. It is also where wind-blown snow comes to rest, so the orange slopes are the ones that load into drifts and slabs after a storm.

Walking

Walking times come from Tobler's hiking function, a rule of thumb fitted to real walkers: about 5 km/h on the level, fastest on a gentle downhill, and slower the steeper it gets in either direction. On roads and tracks the full speed is used; off them, three fifths of it, which is Tobler's own figure for open ground without a path.

From the waypoint to the ridge point is 8.1 km up the old road and 0.6 km across open ground, a climb of 707 m. The model makes it about 2 h 15 min up and 1 h 45 min back down. The model knows nothing of a loaded pack, snow, deadfall, willow, or a creek in flood. Add half again for a real day, and double it with a quarter on your back.