I’m no expert on this, but here’s what I’m seeing—I write this as if you’ve never seen a topo map. Skip down to the last paragraph if you know the basics:


Notice the two creeks running north-south. Look to the one on the east and just west of it is a brown line. That’s an elevation line. Just to the east of that is another with “1100” marked on it. That’s 1100 ft. above sea level. There’s also another line marked 1200 for that elevation. The other lines are the increments in between. The closer they are, the steeper a slope. The farther away, the flatter it is.

You’ll notice the lines often form shapes like this: < or >. They may face any direction. Those are ravines and gullies. If you go to east of the intersection of the two black lines, you’ll see one. The ravine runs eastward down toward the eastern creek. Notice on the other side of the “crosshair,” they run the other direction, though they aren’t pronounced.

Along the vertical crosshair, you’ll see a couple of circles and one enclosed, weird shaped figure. The “15” actually touches a long arm of it. These are high points. On other pieces of ground, they can be depressions. You just have to figure that out based on elevation markings.


What excites me about this map is that on either side of the ridge is a ravine and they come close together right about the center of the “cross hairs. One runs east toward a creek, the other west toward another creek. North and south are two high points, one of which is green (woods), and the other is white (meadow or crops). The lower ground in between is a saddle, a natural travel route. Deer traveling across the ridge will likely use it to use it to get up and down the slopes of the ridge, and perhaps to graze that open field. I bet you’ll find good trail there at the very least. I’d also figure they’d bed high and move down to feed in the bottoms.