Unit G15 (Jones Pass)

CPW's own harvest estimates put mountain goat success in unit G15 at 40% across all manners of take. That is an ordinary spread for this country, and it rewards whoever scouted. The plan: glass from across the basin, judge the climb honestly, and decide whether a hit animal could be recovered.

Glassing from Byers Peak, Mount Machebeuf and Coon Hill

Take a position on one of Byers Peak (12,787 ft), Mount Machebeuf (12,787 ft), Coon Hill (12,751 ft) and Williams Fork Mountains (12,751 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. 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, early hunts find goats higher and later hunts find them pushed down by snow.

Where unit G15 sits inside MG-07

Across MG-07, CPW's 2023 mountain goat success runs 94% in unit G16, 92% in unit G10, 82% in unit G7 and 40% in unit G15. Unit G15 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 G16 carried the better number in the same herd — check its tag count before you read that as an easier hunt.

The way in: USFS 132, Grand CR 50 and U.S. 40

We have no road inventory for this unit, so the only routes we can name are the ones CPW draws the boundary with: USFS 132, Grand CR 50, U.S. 40, I-70 and U.S. 6. 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 Bard Peak, Pettingell Peak, Engelmann Peak and Hagar Mountain as places to see from, and Jones Pass, Loveland Pass, Ptarmigan Pass and Bakerville STL 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

373 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.