Unit 350 (Whitetail)

Montana FWP publishes no elk success figure for unit 350 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 Dry Mountain, Goodwin Mountain and Black Sheep Mountain

Take a position on one of Dry Mountain (6,970 ft), Goodwin Mountain (6,936 ft), Black Sheep Mountain (6,844 ft) and Legget Hill (6,844 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, September bugling works where you can get above a drainage and let the thermals carry sound downhill.

Water against feed

There are 40 mapped stream reaches and 7 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. A tank with no tracks is a tank with no reason to sit on it.

Timing the season: Sep, Oct, Nov

Season normals here run Sep 71/37°F, Oct 56/27°F and Nov 41/17°F. By Nov the lows are around 17°F, and the first hard storm after that moves animals off the high ground — a late tag is a bet on that storm arriving. Precipitation runs about 1.1 in. in Sep, 0.8 in. in Oct and 0.6 in. in Nov, and the graded gravel in this unit turns greasy wet.

Getting past the roads: I 90 and I 15

I 90, I 15 and MT 399 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 Haystack Mountain, Whitetail Peak, McClusky Mountain and Mount Pisgah as places to see from, and Dunks Meadow, Lost Park, Hidden Meadows and Wildhorse Spring 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

356 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 Walkerville, about 13 miles out, which is an hour of your morning each way if you sleep there. With 3,083 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.