3 Tips For Planning The Placement of Treestands and Blinds

Throughout the duration of the summer months, there’s a lot of whitetail work that can be done. Everything from planting food plots to habitat management work to running trail cameras. Among the litany of items that need to be completed is planning your placement of treestands and blinds if you haven’t already. There are a few things to be thinking about though when deciding where to place these in the summer.

When Will You Be Hunting There?

When it comes to planning on where to place your treestand or ground blind, the first thing you need to think of is when will you actually be hunting out of that given location? Things look a lot different in July or August than they do in October. Deer movement will look equally different. If you are hunting a new property, you want to be looking at all of the factors. Just because there are good deer trails in the summer doesn’t necessarily mean deer will be frequenting the same area come fall.

When planning the placement of your treestands or blinds, try and think how deer will be using a given area based on when you’ll be hunting. For example, let’s think about a given property and say that you’ve got a couple of great clover food plots and deer are hammering them in the summer. If you know you’ll be hunting early in the fall, say in September, you will be better off hanging a stand on or near one of the food plots. And you can also be more liberal with how you trim out your stand because the foliage will still be on the trees come the time you’re hunting. On the other hand, if you know you can’t hunt that property until the rut, you may want to hang that stand either in between or on the downwind side of the food plots, anticipating bucks to be cruising while searching for does. Additionally, you’ll want to be more frugal with what you trim, because by then the foliage will be down, and if you cut out a lot, by the time November rolls around, you could stick out like a sore thumb.

What’s Your Access and Exit Plan?

When it comes to planning your treestand or blind placement during the summer, an often forgotten about aspect of it is your access and exit plan. They are arguably just as important as the physical location of your stand or blind. The summer months can be a great time to plan your access and exit, and if need be can be the time to clear trails, mow paths or anything else.

There’s nothing worse than having your stand in a prime location, getting it set in the summer, and then returning to hunt in the fall, only to realize you failed to establish an adequate way into the stand or a solid way out. A good example of this is to use another scenario to illustrate this point. Let’s say you find a great rut stand in a river bottom during the month of July. You hike in from the main access point, locate the great area, get the stand-up and leave. Then while thinking it over during the following months, you think of using the river as access. You figure you can boat all the way to where you can park on the shore, and then jump right into the stand with minimal intrusion. Sounds great right? You then return to the location during November to hunt with the boat, but halfway into the expedition, the river narrows and there’s logs and debris stretching the width of the river and its impassable without making a ruckus. This is where a lack of planning can hurt you tremendously.

To do it right, as soon as you think of the river being a viable option for access, you should take the boat in and do a “trial” run. Make sure you can get to where you need to be. Bring a chainsaw, handsaw, whatever you need to ensure that if you need to clear the way, you can do so. That way when you show up to hunt later in the fall, you know you’ll be good and won’t have to worry. You’ll be able to get in quiet and clean and can focus on the hunt itself.

What Wind Direction Will You Need?

This is also a very important part of planning your treestand and blind placements. As you think through everything to help yourself be as successful as possible, you need to be thinking about what kind of wind direction you’ll need to make a spot great. If you are hanging a stand that will be a primarily early season spot, be thinking about warmer days and southerly winds. Don’t hang just one early-season stand where you need to have a Northeast wind to hunt it. Odds are you won’t be able to hunt it that often, or you’ll just mess things up. The same can be said for a rut stand. Once you find the perfect area, think through the wind directions. Often times as it gets colder and fall progresses, you’ll have more Northerly winds, especially in the upper Midwest. If the area that you’ve selected as a primary rut spot is that good, you should consider hanging a couple of different stand or blind options, so you have more than one option with different wind directions.

Conclusion

As you plan where you want to place treestands and blinds during the summer, there are a lot of things you should be thinking about in order to obtain the highest level of success possible. These three that have been laid out will no doubt help you be successful. If you’re thinking about when you’ll be hunting a given location, how you’ll get in and out of the spot and the wind direction you’ll need, you’ll be well on your way to having a treestand or blind in a solid spot come fall.