Unit 262 (Bitterroot Farmlands)

What Montana FWP publishes for unit 262 is a boundary, not a elk map. Every place named below sits inside the unit line. Which of them holds animals in your season is for you to find out. The unit lies in Missoula and Ravalli counties. It runs to about 124 square miles.

The lines of the unit: Miller Creek, Threemile Creek and Iron Cap Creek

Montana FWP draws unit 262 in Missoula and Ravalli counties with a boundary that runs on State Route 38 and US Highway 93, and on Miller Creek, Threemile Creek, Iron Cap Creek and Middle Burnt Fork, walked corner by corner in its hunting district legal descriptions. Read it as a frame, not as a hint about animals. Those features are what you will check against the map all week, and the divides among them are the ones that matter.

High ground inside the line: Sunset Bench and North Bench

Named high points inside the unit include Sunset Bench at 4,019 feet and North Bench at 3,648 feet. None carries a public-land flag we trust, so settle the ownership question before you plan to stand on one. Elk on low, open country live on distance and visibility, so they see you first.

Holding ground: Pine Hollow, Dry Gulch and Treece Gulch

Below them sit Pine Hollow at 3,442 feet, Dry Gulch at 3,399 feet, Treece Gulch at 3,387 feet, Dry Gulch at 3,274 feet and Spring Gulch at 3,781 feet. These are the folds worth watching, and the ones other hunters walk past on the way to somewhere steeper. Reaching the edge of one before light beats reaching its middle at noon.

Water in this unit

The water inside the unit line comes to 143 mapped stream reaches, 2 lakes and 210 stock tanks. On ground with that many tanks, knowing which two or three hold water in your season is the most useful thing a scouting trip can tell you.

Reading the land status

Our ownership read for this unit is approximate — it comes out as Private / Other 100%, so treat it as a starting point and check a current land-status layer before you plan a route. The unit runs from 3,361 feet to 3,855 feet, averaging 3,571 — not much relief, so the animals move laterally rather than up and down.

Montana FWP publishes no elk success figure for unit 262 that we can tie to this unit alone, so we won't quote one. The plan: find the feed, find the timber it backs onto, then watch the seam between them at the edges of the day.

Glassing from Sunset Bench and North Bench

Take a position on one of Sunset Bench (4,019 ft) and North Bench (3,648 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. Give a basin forty minutes before you decide it is empty. On the rut hunts, September bugling works where you can get above a drainage and let the thermals carry sound downhill.

Water against feed

There are 143 mapped stream reaches and 210 tanks inside the unit, so water is rarely the limiting factor. Where water is everywhere, feed is what concentrates animals, so hunt the feed and treat water as a convenience. Check the ground around it before you commit an evening to it.

Timing the season: Sep, Oct, Nov

Season normals here run Sep 73/41°F, Oct 58/32°F and Nov 43/24°F. Warm afternoons compress the hunting into the first and last hour, and make meat care the day's real problem rather than the shot. Precipitation runs about 0.9 in. in Sep, 1 in. in Oct and 1.1 in. in Nov, and the graded gravel in this unit turns greasy wet.

Getting past the roads: S-269 and MT 203

MT 203 is the paved frame, which is also where everyone else starts. There is little true four-wheel-drive road here, so distance from the gravel is the only thing separating you from the next hunter.

A first plan from the pins on this page

The map above marks Sunset Bench and North Bench as places to see from, and Spring Gulch, Charleys Gulch, S-269 @ unit boundary and Victor 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

124 square miles is more country than a week will cover, so pick one drainage and learn it rather than driving the unit. The nearest services are at Victor, about 5 miles out, which is an hour of your morning each way if you sleep there. 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. We have no elk success figure for this unit that survives checking against Montana FWP's own harvest and hunter counts, and we would rather say so than print a statewide average as though it were measured here.