Hunt Vantage

Find the best glassing and stand spots for any hunting ground. Draw a box on the map (or search a place), and the app pulls real elevation and satellite tree cover for that ground, runs a line-of-sight viewshed analysis, and ranks the spots that see the most, explained in plain English, with a 3D stand-eye view.

No API keys. Everything runs on free, keyless data:

• Elevation: Mapzen/AWS Terrain Tiles (Terrarium-encoded, NASA/USGS derived).
• Imagery and tree cover: Esri World Imagery, classified canopy versus open.
• Both fetched on demand through a small serverless proxy, decoded in the browser.

How it works

1. You draw the ground. Search to a location, then drag a rectangle over it (capped at 30 sq km; larger boxes are refused).

2. The app builds the parcel. A Web Worker fetches elevation and imagery tiles, decodes a metric heightmap, and classifies a tree-density mask (slope-suppressed so cliffs do not read as forest).

3. It scores every spot. For a grid of candidate observers it casts radial sightlines over the terrain and the tree canopy (canopy surface equals ground plus an effective tree height that scales with density), then blends:

   Factor	What it rewards
   Visibility	sees the most huntable ground in range (closer counts for more)
   Edge habitat	overlooks forest-to-opening transitions where game moves
   High ground	local prominence, for better sightlines and thermals
   Sun and aspect	sun-favored slopes for the chosen hunt window
   Wind discipline	keeps your scent off the prime habitat
   Concealment	sits in edge cover so you are not skylined

4. You get ranked spots: a green-to-red vantage heatmap, numbered pins, each spot's exact viewshed footprint, acres of open ground visible, a GPX export, and a 3D drape of the parcel with the vantage marked.

Weights, glassing range, eye height (standing versus tree stand), wind, and hunt time are all tunable under "Tune the analysis". Any drawn area produces a shareable URL (the bbox is encoded in the link), so you can send a parcel to a hunting partner and it re-runs on open.

Run locally

Needs Bun 1.4 or newer.

bun install
bun run dev

Then open the printed localhost URL. bun run build produces the static site in dist/. Vite is still the dev server and bundler; the scripts run it on the Bun runtime. The /api/tiles proxy runs as a Vercel serverless function in production and as Vite dev middleware locally (see vite.config.js), so behavior is identical in both.

Deploy

This repo is connected to Vercel, so pushing to master deploys automatically. To set it up fresh: import the repo into Vercel (framework preset Vite), or run vercel from the repo root. vercel.json pins the install (bun install --frozen-lockfile), the build and the tile-proxy function.

Checks

bun run check runs the formatter, the linter and the build. bun fmt ships in Bun 1.4.4, but bun lint only exists on Bun canary for now (bun upgrade --canary), so CI runs both on canary and keeps the build job on the pinned Bun release.

Caveats

• Tree classification is leaf-on and summer-biased, so deciduous winter cover is under-counted. Canopy height is an assumption that scales with density. Swap in a real canopy-height raster for sharper occlusion.
• The DEM is bare-earth, so you correctly see game on the ground; trees are added as the occluder on top.
• Not legal or safety advice. It models sightlines, not legal shooting hours, property boundaries, or safe backstops. Hunt responsibly.

Acknowledgements

• Built with the help of Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic), running in Claude Code. The data pipeline, viewshed engine, scoring, UI, and deployment were all produced in that session.
• Based on and inspired by ode-to-yosemite by Shlok Khemani. The keyless terrain and satellite tile pipeline, the Terrarium elevation decode, and the canopy-from-imagery classifier are adapted from that project. Huge thanks and full credit to that work for showing what was possible and giving this app its foundation.

Attribution

Elevation: Mapzen/AWS Terrain Tiles. Imagery: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics. Geocoding: OpenStreetMap and Nominatim.