In this paper, we propose an efficient route discovery scheme for mobile ad hoc networks called Hop-Wise Limited broadcast (HoWL). Since nodes do not identify the location of other nodes, some of the routing protocols proposed for mobile ad hoc networks use network-wide broadcasts to discover a route. In contrast, HoWL limits the area of a route discovery by predicting the current location of the destination node using history of hop counts of previously used routes. We also introduce Characterized Environmental Indicators (CEI) which characterize environments for networks of mobile nodes. Specifically, environments can be characterized by three indicators: node density, average hop count of utilized routes, and frequency of link failure. We have implemented HoWL as an extension to DSR on GloMoSim network simulator. Quantitative and qualitative performance comparisons were evaluated between HoWL and its related work, Expanding Ring Search (RING) and LAR. The simulations show that HoWL performs best when low communication overhead is desired where up to 20% decrease over RING and three-fold decrease over LAR in the overhead were demonstrated. Thus, HoWL is most effective in overhead sensitive environments such as battery-limited sensor networks.