Unit 125

CPW's own harvest estimates put mule deer success in unit 125 at archery 23% and rifle 33%. That is an ordinary spread for this country, and it rewards whoever scouted. The plan: glass the broken edges at first light, then sit still and keep glassing the same ground.

Glassing from Meredith Hill

Take a position on Meredith Hill (4,404 ft) and be on it before light. Work the morning with the air falling away from you, then accept that by mid-morning the wind has reversed and the plan has to change with it. Work the glass in strips and go back over ground you already covered — animals appear in country you looked at ten minutes ago. On the rut hunts, late-season hunts put bucks with doe groups and moving in daylight.

Getting past the roads

There is little true four-wheel-drive road here, so distance from the gravel is the only thing separating you from the next hunter. 36 mapped public entry points fall inside the unit, so decide which one you take before the morning you take it.

Where unit 125 sits inside D-28

Across D-28, CPW's 2023 mule deer success runs 47% in unit 129, 43% in unit 126, 42% in unit 139, 40% in unit 130 and 40% in unit 145. Unit 125 is the lowest of them, so whatever drives success in this herd is happening somewhere else in it. If the draw lets you choose, unit 129 carried the better number in the same herd — check its tag count before you read that as an easier hunt.

The way in: Colo. 96, Kiowa CR 19 and Bent CR 14

We have no road inventory for this unit, so the only routes we can name are the ones CPW draws the boundary with: Colo. 96, Kiowa CR 19, Bent CR 14, Bent CR 15 and Colo. 109. Those are its edges, not its interior — useful because they are where you leave the pavement, and useless for telling you what the inside is like. Pick the edge nearest the country you mean to hunt and work in from it on foot, rather than driving the perimeter looking for a way through.

A first plan from the pins on this page

The map above marks Meredith Hill as places to see from, and Picketwire Valley, Black Draw, Blue Lake STL and Dawn Pond SWA as ground to watch. Each pin is a named feature verified to fall inside the unit line, not a spot anyone has hunted. Take the pair you can reach on one road and treat the rest as a second trip.

What a day here costs you

585 square miles is more country than a week will cover, so pick one drainage and learn it rather than driving the unit. The ground is gentle enough that the pack-out is a distance problem rather than a climbing one. One good position held through the whole of first light beats three visited in a hurry.

What we can't tell you

Some of the ground named above carries no land-status flag we trust, so check ownership on a current layer before you hunt it.