Unit G03 (Mount Harvard)

CPW's own harvest estimates put mountain goat success in unit G03 at 90% across all manners of take. A number like that comes from few tags and a short season, not from easy hunting. The plan: glass from across the basin, judge the climb honestly, and decide whether a hit animal could be recovered.

Glassing from Grizzly Peak, Huron Peak and Mount Hope

Take a position on one of Grizzly Peak (13,959 ft), Huron Peak (13,955 ft), Mount Hope (13,928 ft) and Ice Mountain (13,911 ft) and be on it before light. Cold air slides downhill in the dark, so keep your scent out of the bowl you mean to watch; expect the thermals to turn uphill an hour after the sun reaches the slope. A tripod is worth more here than another hour of walking. On the rut hunts, early hunts find goats higher and later hunts find them pushed down by snow.

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. One mapped public entry point falls inside the unit, so decide which one you take before the morning you take it.

Where unit G03 sits inside MG-01

Across MG-01, CPW's 2023 mountain goat success runs 100% in unit G2, 90% in unit G3 and 43% in unit G1. That puts unit G03 behind 1 of the 3 other units in the herd. If the draw lets you choose, unit G2 carried the better number in the same herd — check its tag count before you read that as an easier hunt.

The way in: Colo. 82, U.S. 24 and Chaffee CR 306

We have no road inventory for this unit, so the only routes we can name are the ones CPW draws the boundary with: Colo. 82, U.S. 24, Chaffee CR 306, USFS 209 and USFS 742. 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. Park on the boundary and walk; a unit you can only enter from its rim rewards whoever is willing to leave the truck at the rim.

A first plan from the pins on this page

The map above marks Mount Harvard, La Plata Peak, Mount Yale and Mount Belford as places to see from, and Elkhead Pass, Church Basin, Missouri Basin and Clear Creek Reservoir SWA as ground to watch. Each pin is a named feature verified to fall inside the unit line, not a spot anyone has hunted. Join two of them into a morning: be on the first before light, move to the second once the thermals turn.

What a day here costs you

466 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. Leave the truck earlier than you want to and you will hunt the best half-hour of the day.

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.