Unit 320 (South Tobacco Root Mountains)

Montana FWP publishes no elk success figure for unit 320 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 Lonesome Peak, Noble Peak and Mount Bradley

Take a position on one of Lonesome Peak (10,374 ft), Noble Peak (10,366 ft), Mount Bradley (10,362 ft) and Thompson Peak (10,352 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, September bugling works where you can get above a drainage and let the thermals carry sound downhill.

Water against feed

There are 361 mapped stream reaches and 225 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 72/42°F, Oct 58/32°F and Nov 44/23°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 1.2 in. in Sep, 1.1 in. in Oct and 0.6 in. in Nov, and the graded gravel in this unit turns greasy wet.

Getting past the roads: MT 287 and US 287

MT 287, US 287 and MT 55 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 Hollowtop Mountain, Granite Peak, Branham Peaks and Lakeshore Mountain as places to see from, and Mustard Pass, Low Pass, Hells Hole and Guymon 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

837 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 Mammoth, about 7 miles out, which is an hour of your morning each way if you sleep there. With 4,141 feet between the lowest and highest ground, the walk back up out of a kill site is the part to plan first. 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 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.