Thanks Rong.
Thanks Driftboater.
The area is a little less than a mile from the nearest road, but it’s a dead end in the valley. So, no through traffic.
If the place is occupied when we get there on Friday, we will move on to plans B, C …. There aren’t too may places in the area that are more than a mile from some type of logging road. We could have backpacked up into one of the wilderness areas, but we decided against that on this trip. Again, our worst-case scenario is to exclusively hunt my private land 20 miles away for bear. Our collective mindset, I think, is to work hard; be disciplined; have fun; enjoy the hiking camping, eating Virginia venison; etc …, and if we get something nice, that's icing on the cake.
If you look at the group photo above, there are two small ridges protruding from the left border of the pic. The furthest one is that whiteish ridge at the top-right of the aerial map (NE of the lake). The other is NNW of the lake (it's also the same ridge you can see at the very left of the pic of the meadow). It's halfway between the center and left pinned locations, and likely is better than the left one, on further review. Parts of the latter has views of both the lake and the meadow with the stream. Winds are predicted to be from the WSW. So, if we move further west (to the left of the aerial pic), we might increase our odds of seeing something further down the valley, but we may begin increasing the odds of casting our scent toward the lake/meadow. We will experiment/move as we feel is necessary, but that is one consideration.
Best regards and good luck to you all.
