Colorado Bighorn Sheep

Unit S72 (Greenland)

Colorado Hunting Guide — Bighorn Sheep

Unit S72 lies in Douglas County. CPW bounds it by Wolfensberger Rd and Wilcox St among others. CPW publishes no per-unit bighorn sheep success figure we can verify for this unit. Federal land covers about 29% of it. Check land status on a current map before you plan a route.

View Draw Odds Colorado Hunting Guide

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29%

Public Land

Build your own PDF hunt guide for Unit S72

Answer a few questions about your tag, your season and your rig, and the Field Intelligence Report builds a print-ready Colorado Unit S72 guide around your hunt: three ranked spots with morning, afternoon and evening plays, a day-by-day plan, topo maps with every pin numbered, a camp and access plan, the legal and retrieval rules for this unit, shot discipline, a meat-care and pack-out plan, and a pre-trip checklist. Every coordinate sits on land recorded as public.

Bighorn Sheep guide

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Bighorn Sheep Hunting in Unit S72

Where to Find Bighorn Sheep in Unit S72

CPW draws an exact line around unit S72 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 Douglas County.

The lines of the unit: Wolfensberger Rd, Wilcox St and Colo. 86

CPW has unit S72 bounded on the north by Wolfensberger Rd., Wilcox St. and Colo. 86; on the east by Colo. 83; o S by Palmer Divide Rd.; on the west by Colo. 105. It tells you the shape of the unit and nothing about its inhabitants. Its value is practical — those are the features you will navigate by, and the ridges that separate one day's country from another's.

High ground inside the line: Bald Mountain, True Mountain and Raspberry Butte

Named high points inside the unit include Bald Mountain at 7,880 feet, True Mountain at 7,788 feet, Raspberry Butte at 7,736 feet, Monkey Face at 7,706 feet and Spruce Mountain at 7,613 feet. None carries a public-land flag we trust, so settle the ownership question before you plan to stand on one. Sheep on lower country still need rock, and on a desert unit the rock is the whole hunt.

Holding ground: Lake Gulch, Sellers Gulch and Russellville Gulch

Below them sit Lake Gulch at 6,387 feet, Sellers Gulch at 6,169 feet, Russellville Gulch at 6,125 feet, Butler Canyon at 7,094 feet and North Gulch at 6,716 feet. Those are the basins, parks and bottoms this unit has, and they are what you glass into from above. Pick the one with the least road on its upwind side.

The herd this unit belongs to: RBS-39

CPW does not manage bighorn sheep unit by unit. It manages them as data analysis unit RBS-39, and unit S72 is one piece of it. CPW puts no other unit in RBS-39, so this unit carries the herd on its own. So the objective behind your tag was written for that whole area, and a neighbouring unit in the same herd is a fairer comparison than the statewide figure.

Unit S72 terrain and land status

Measured from the unit boundary, not from the agency write-up

Named features inside the unit

Glass from: Bald Mountain (7,880 ft), Raspberry Butte (7,736 ft), Spruce Mountain (7,613 ft)

Holding ground: Butler Canyon (7,094 ft), North Gulch (6,716 ft)

Every one of these was tested against the unit polygon before it went on the map. They are starting points, not agency recommendations.

How to Hunt Bighorn Sheep in Unit S72

CPW publishes no bighorn sheep success figure for unit S72 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 Dawson Butte, Corner Mountain and Nemrick Butte

Take a position on one of Dawson Butte (7,477 ft), Corner Mountain (7,464 ft), Nemrick Butte (7,461 ft) and Larkspur Butte (7,454 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. A tripod is worth more here than another hour of walking. On the rut hunts, late hunts put rams with ewe groups on the same rock.

The way in: Colo. 86, Colo. 83 and Colo. 105

We have no road inventory for this unit, so the only routes we can name are the ones CPW draws the boundary with: Colo. 86, Colo. 83 and Colo. 105. 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. Check each of them on a current motor-vehicle-use map before you count on it, because a line on a boundary description is not a promise of public access.

A first plan from the pins on this page

The map above marks Bald Mountain, Raspberry Butte and Spruce Mountain as places to see from, and Butler Canyon and North Gulch 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

195 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. 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.

Colorado rules that decide your day

Summarised from CPW regulations. They change — read the current regulations and your permit-tag before you hunt.

Legal shooting hours

Big game may be taken from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset.

Motorized retrieval

Colorado has no general off-road retrieval allowance. Travel stays on designated routes, so plan to pack every animal out on your back or with stock. Check the forest or BLM travel map for the roads that are actually open in hunting season.

Tagging

Validate and attach your carcass tag before the animal is moved, and keep evidence of sex attached until the carcass reaches your home or a processor.

Leaving meat

Abandoning edible meat is illegal. CPW counts the four quarters and the loins.

Where you may not shoot

Occupied structures — No discharging a firearm within 50 yards of a developed campsite, and never toward an occupied building.
Roads — No shooting from or across a public road, and no shooting from a motor vehicle.

Bighorn Sheep: where to put the shot

Broadside or quartering away, on the back edge of the front leg about a third of the way up the body.

Shots to refuse

Nothing behind or overlapping the animal you picked.
Your maximum range is the farthest you have shot a three-shot group into a paper plate from the rest you are carrying.
Pass the shot you are talking yourself into.

Plan the carry: roughly 40– 120 lb of boned-out meat, before head and hide — two large coolers. ProHunt planning estimate, not an agency figure.

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Bighorn Sheep Success Rates

CPW's 2023 harvest estimates carry no bighorn sheep row for unit S72 that we can read back to this unit on its own. Where the agency reports a unit inside a grouping, or prints a table our parser cannot resolve to a single column, we leave the number out rather than publish a statewide average as though it had been measured here. CPW's current harvest estimates are the place to check before you apply.

Bighorn Sheep Draw Odds

Season	Tags	Applicants	Draw %	Pts Req
Rifle — 1st Season ewe only (resident)	1	55	1.8%	3
Rifle — 1st Season ewe only (nonresident)	0	0	0.0%	—
Rifle — 1st Season ram only (resident)	1	177	0.6%	3
Rifle — 1st Season ram only (nonresident)	0	0	0.0%	—

Data from 2020 draw results. Each row is one residency pool — read the label before the number.

Open in Draw Odds Engine

CPW's 2022 draw recap for bighorn sheep in unit S72, by hunt code, with resident and nonresident kept apart because the two draw from different licence pools:

SMS72W1R — Rifle, 1st Season, Ram Only, resident: 177 applicants for 1 licences, 0.6% drawn, 3 preference points needed

Colorado runs a pure preference-point draw, so the point figure above is the requirement the agency published for that code in that year, not a forecast for the next one. Figures checked against CPW's own statistics pages on 2026-06-09.

Unit Logistics & Expectations

Planning Notes

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Camp Sites

Multi-day backcountry camp required. No developed facilities.

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Road Conditions

Remote access. Significant hiking required from any road.

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Terrain Difficulty

Extreme. Remote alpine and canyon sheep terrain.

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Hunting Pressure

None. One tag over three years.

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Weather

Plan for all conditions. Mountain weather can change rapidly. Snow likely by October.

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Cell Service

None expected in sheep terrain.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Colorado unit S72?

Unit S72 lies in Douglas County, and CPW has it bounded on the north by Wolfensberger Rd., Wilcox St. and Colo. 86; on the east by Colo. 83; o S by Palmer Divide Rd.; on the west by Colo. 105.

What is the bighorn sheep success rate in unit S72?

CPW publishes no bighorn sheep success figure we can tie to unit S72 on its own — the 2023 harvest tables either omit the unit or report it in a grouping we could not read back to it reliably. Rather than quote a statewide average as though it were measured here, we say so. Check CPW's current harvest estimates before you apply.

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Sources & Verification

Every fact on this page is tied to a primary source below. Last fact-checked 2026-10-23.

Colorado Sheep & Goat Hunting Brochure — Game Management Unit (GMU) Descriptions (pp. 16-17) — Colorado Parks and Wildlife · supports: GMU boundary description, Counties the unit lies in, Data analysis unit (DAU) the unit belongs to · accessed 2026-10-22
CPW CPWAdminData feature service — GMU and sheep/goat unit boundaries — Colorado Parks and Wildlife GIS Unit · supports: Mapped extent of the unit, Which named ground falls inside the unit line · accessed 2026-10-22