Unit S80 (Black Canyon)

CPW draws an exact line around unit S80 and says nothing about where the bighorn sheep stand inside it. So the ground below is the unit's own and the read on where to start is ours, labelled as such. The unit lies in Delta, Gunnison and Montrose counties.

The lines of the unit: Curecanti National Recreation Area S and W of Colo. 92

CPW has unit S80 bounded by the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, and Curecanti National Recreation Area S and W of Colo. 92. That is a legal description, not a habitat map. What it does give you is the way in: the rivers and highways you cross, and the divides that decide which drainage you end up in.

High ground inside the line: Morrow Point, Pioneer Lookout Point and Buttermilk Ridge

Named high points inside the unit include Morrow Point at 8,989 feet, Pioneer Lookout Point at 8,034 feet, Buttermilk Ridge at 7,849 feet, Curecanti Needle at 7,536 feet and Black Ridge at 7,466 feet. Several carry a public-land flag in our data, which makes them the first places to try for a view. Sheep on lower country still need rock, and on a desert unit the rock is the whole hunt.

Holding ground: Spring Gulch, Pool Gulch and Lime Kiln Gulch

Below them sit Spring Gulch at 6,752 feet, Pool Gulch at 6,746 feet, Lime Kiln Gulch at 6,475 feet, Pitts Meadow at 6,169 feet and Long Gulch at 5,306 feet. Those are the basins, parks and bottoms this unit has, and they are what you glass into from above. Reaching the edge of one before light beats reaching its middle at noon.

Water: Lions Spring

Named sources include Lions Spring. Nothing in the data says which of them run in autumn, so a scouting trip earns its fuel.

The herd this unit belongs to: RBS-29

CPW does not manage bighorn sheep unit by unit. It manages them as data analysis unit RBS-29, and unit S80 is one piece of it. CPW puts no other unit in RBS-29, so this unit carries the herd on its own. That matters twice over: the population objective and the licence numbers are set for the whole area, and the animals move across unit lines inside it without noticing them.

CPW publishes no bighorn sheep success figure for unit S80 that we can tie to this unit alone, so we won't quote one. The plan: pick a glassing position across from the escape terrain and stay on it for hours, not minutes.

Glassing from Smiths Mountain, Morrow Point and Pioneer Lookout Point

Take a position on one of Smiths Mountain (5,640 ft), Morrow Point (8,989 ft), Pioneer Lookout Point (8,034 ft) and Buttermilk Ridge (7,849 ft) and be on it before light. In the dark the air runs downhill. Pick an approach that doesn't send it into the country you want to see, and plan to move once the slope warms. 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 hunts put rams with ewe groups on the same rock.

A first plan from the pins on this page

The map above marks Morrow Point, Pioneer Lookout Point, Buttermilk Ridge and Black Ridge as places to see from, and Myers Gulch, Cottonwood Gulch, Bear Trap Gulch and Lions Spring 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

174 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. Decide the night before where you will be at first light, and go there in the dark.

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. We have no bighorn sheep success figure for this unit that survives checking against CPW's own harvest and hunter counts, and we would rather say so than print a statewide average as though it were measured here.