Unit 314 (Upper Yellowstone West)

Montana FWP draws an exact line around unit 314 and says nothing about where the elk stand inside it. The country below is verified; where to begin in it is our judgement, not the agency's. The unit lies in Gallatin and Park counties. It runs to about 541 square miles.

The lines of the unit: Yellowstone River, Trail Creek and Goose Creek

Montana FWP draws unit 314 in Gallatin and Park counties with a boundary that runs on Interstate 90, and on Yellowstone River, Trail Creek, Goose Creek and Gallatin-Yellowstone River, 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: Mount Chisholm, Ramshorn Peak and Twin Peaks

Named high points inside the unit include Mount Chisholm at 10,312 feet, Ramshorn Peak at 10,274 feet, Twin Peaks at 10,164 feet, Fridley Peak at 10,127 feet and Steamboat Mountain at 10,032 feet. Several carry a public-land flag in our data, which makes them the first places to try for a view. Elk on low, open country live on distance and visibility, so they see you first.

Holding ground: Tom Miner Basin, Morrison Gulch and Bozeman Pass

Below them sit Tom Miner Basin at 5,739 feet, Morrison Gulch at 5,716 feet, Bozeman Pass at 5,713 feet, Big Draw at 5,674 feet and Tie Gulch at 5,319 feet. These are the folds worth watching, and the ones other hunters walk past on the way to somewhere steeper. Work out which of them you can see from one position before you pick a camp.

Water: Sunny Brook Spring

The water inside the unit line comes to 492 mapped stream reaches, 7 lakes, 38 stock tanks and 1 springs. Named sources include Sunny Brook Spring. Nothing in the data says which of them run in autumn, so a scouting trip earns its fuel.

Reading the land status

Our ownership read for this unit is approximate — it comes out as National Forest 60%, Private / Other 32% and State Trust 8%, so treat it as a starting point and check a current land-status layer before you plan a route. The unit runs from 4,898 feet to 8,628 feet, averaging 6,496 — enough relief to separate summer range from winter range.

Montana FWP publishes no elk success figure for unit 314 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 Specimen Ridge, Sawtooth Mountain and Mans Foot Mountain

Take a position on one of Specimen Ridge (9,463 ft), Sawtooth Mountain (9,421 ft), Mans Foot Mountain (9,405 ft) and Deaf Jim Knob (8,203 ft) and be on it before light. Work the morning with the air falling away from you, then accept that by mid-morning the wind has reversed and the plan has to change with it. 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 492 mapped stream reaches and 38 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. Sitting water works where you can see fresh tracks going in, and nowhere else.

Timing the season: Sep, Oct, Nov

Season normals here run Sep 72/43°F, Oct 58/34°F and Nov 43/25°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 1.4 in. in Sep, 1.6 in. in Oct and 1 in. in Nov, and the graded gravel in this unit turns greasy wet.

Getting past the roads: I 90 / US 191 and US 89

I 90 / US 191, US 89 and MT 540 are 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 Mount Chisholm, Ramshorn Peak, Steamboat Mountain and The Sentinel as places to see from, and Windy Pass, Horseshoe Basin, Beattie Gulch and Sunny Brook 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

541 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 Gallatin Gateway, about 23 miles out, which is an hour of your morning each way if you sleep there. With 3,730 feet between the lowest and highest ground, the walk back up out of a kill site is the part to plan first. 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 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.