Weyerhauser: St Helens - inscrutable?

[ljsommer]

I have had the Aberdeen permit in the past and had an easy time of it - finding gates was easy, the roads weren't difficult to navigate, it wasn't crowded, and I got my first (only) deer there in 2019. I have the drive in permit for the St Helens area this year and have 2 issues: 1.) The gates are extremely difficult to find. I drove for 7 hours yesterday (2 hours there, 3 hours on gravel roads in public forestland looking for gates, 2 hours home) and went home frustrated. Issue 2.) OnX was totally inaccurate. I've never actually had this happen. While I am a failure of a hunter, I am not inexperienced using OnX as I've used it for hunting, hiking, camping, offroading, etc. I've never had this happen. OnX was off on my phone as well as my wife's phone, telling us there were mainlines that didn't exist, and totally misrepresenting the areas we were in, sometimes having my truck appear off in the trees.

Is it just me? Does anyone else find the gates in this area extremely difficult to locate? This seems like prime deer hunting weather but yesterday was so frustrating to me that I can't stomach the idea of another 7 hours in the truck.

[HntnFsh]

No. There paper and online maps show every gate that allows recreational access.
Onx has been fine for me, but i dont use it for navigation much if at all.

[dub870]

Get the avenza map app and download the Weyerhaeuser map for that area. Very accurate.

[Alan K]

Get the avenza map app and download the Weyerhaeuser map for that area. Very accurate.

 

The pdf map is geo-refenced, download Avenza and use it like dub said.

OnX (and any of the ownership apps) suck with regards to road layers.

[ljsommer]

No. There paper and online maps show every gate that allows recreational access.
Onx has been fine for me, but i dont use it for navigation much if at all.

I just took out my paper map and laid it on the kitchen table and crossed referenced the roads with OnX on my laptop - it's definitely off. I can point to specific areas that are not accurate at all.

[ljsommer]

Get the avenza map app and download the Weyerhaeuser map for that area. Very accurate.

Wonderful thank you I'll do that! I appreciate the advice!

[brokentrail]

Were you using your phone in a phone case?  I had the problem once that my phone case was somehow interfering with the GPs signal and not giving an accurate representation of where i actually was.  Removing the phone from the phone case and restarting it resolved the problem for me and I bought a different phone case that works fine now.

[ljsommer]

Were you using your phone in a phone case?  I had the problem once that my phone case was somehow interfering with the GPs signal and not giving an accurate representation of where i actually was.  Removing the phone from the phone case and restarting it resolved the problem for me and I bought a different phone case that works fine now.

yes I was! Though I will say (repeat) that I've been using OnX for a decade now and have used it all over the place, and in other states, and I've never encountered this before. However, my wife also encountered the same behavior, and I confirmed this morning via the paper map that OnX definitely has a different idea of that place than I do.

I still think it's incredibly complicated to find these gates though compared to the Aberdeen permit. The navigating to the gates that theoretically exist in there is a tangled spiders web.

The wife is going back out tomorrow while I work to see if she can find the gates so that I at least have somewhere to point to when I go hunt Halloween morning, which is my next available hunt day.
I've got a buddy that has given me some good options to go hunt Montana, and considering I have now spent $xxx hundreds on a permit for weyerhauser on top of the license and tags for WA, plus the wasted gas, plus the 7 hours spent in the truck yesterday, plus my sour little-boy temper tantrum I've had most of the weekend because of this experience, I am starting to think that I should just head to Montana next year.

[Alan K]

OnX just displays publicly available road layers. Private land road layers are proprietary and not shared with these companies.  They may be fudged in a bit, or not updated for 20 years when a public agency tried to map roads. Trash most of the time.

Weyerhauser provides the geo-referenced map that is 100x better than OnX, and with Avenza it even has a little blue dot so you don't even have to know how to read/navigate a map.  Your frustration is coming because you're just using the wrong tool for navigation.

Pretty much all of the paid permit areas regardless of the company provide geo-referenced maps that should be used. OnX is fine for public lands (because it just uses publicly available data), but is junk for private lands short of who owns it.

[brokentrail]

I wonder, since you and your wife had the same issues with the GPS being "off", if maybe some satellites were down or something in that area, at that time.

[ljsommer]

Thank you for the advice, I hadn't ever had any issues with OnX before so this was new to me and it totally threw me off. We'll both download that app and the relevant maps.
I don't suppose there are any St Helens permit owners willing to share any advice? We're both feeling pretty deflated, and my track record being what it is has left a pretty huge dent in my ego. I am not used to such prolonged failure. I usually succeed at what I set myself to, so this has been a very rough pill to swallow.

[craigapphunt]

Pm sent