Alot of my scouting turns into pre season trimming. Deer are lazy plain and simple. If you know where they feed and where the bedding cover is you' ve got them beat. I go out mid june when the trees are covered with leaves. I trim/cut trails through good cover from bedding aeras to food and try to have them cross a run or two effectively making my own " funnels" . Buck tend to like good cover so I don' t cut the trails to wide, just wide enough to make easy going through the thick crap. It dosn' t take long, a couple of weeks or so for the deer to find the trail and once they do you have them. This is also a good time to start mock scrapes. Don' t use scents designed for the rut. I' d use any pre or post rut curiosity scent. Start the scrapes small and let the deer take them over. Belive it or not the will frequent these scrapes all year long.
I find winter scouting to have its limits. It is good to know what survived hunting season but once deer yard up they don' t move a whole lot so there is limited info avaiable at this time of year. I also don' t like to stumble into a yard of deer and bother the deer in any way once we have good snow on the ground. I live in maine and the winters are hard enough on the deer. I certainly don' t want to have any negative inpact onthe heard. JM$.02