Unit 540 (Southeast Little Belt Mountains)

Montana FWP draws an exact line around unit 540 and says nothing about where the elk stand inside it. 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 Meagher and Wheatland counties. It runs to about 582 square miles.

The lines of the unit: Spring Creek and Judith Basin

Montana FWP draws unit 540 in Meagher and Wheatland counties with a boundary that runs on US Highway 12, USFS Road 274, USFS Road 189 and USFS Trail 603, and on Spring Creek and Judith Basin, walked corner by corner in its hunting district legal descriptions. Read it as a frame, not as a hint about animals. What it does give you is the way in: the rivers and highways you cross, and the divides that decide which drainage you end up in.

High ground inside the line: Mount High, Bluff Mountain and Daisy Peak

Named high points inside the unit include Mount High at 8,246 feet, Bluff Mountain at 8,233 feet, Daisy Peak at 7,774 feet, Muddy Mountain at 7,502 feet and Bartleson Peak at 7,501 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: Daisy Narrows, Morrisy Coulee Narrows and Nevada Narrows

Below them sit Daisy Narrows at 6,218 feet, Morrisy Coulee Narrows at 6,175 feet, Nevada Narrows at 6,027 feet, Haymaker Narrows at 5,940 feet and Iron Springs Coulee at 5,534 feet. Those are the basins, parks and bottoms this unit has, and they are what you glass into from above. Two you can watch from a single knob is worth more than five you have to drive between.

Water in this unit

The water inside the unit line comes to 378 mapped stream reaches, 12 lakes, 198 stock tanks and 14 springs. 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 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 4,526 feet to 7,128 feet, averaging 5,394 — enough relief to separate summer range from winter range.

Montana FWP publishes no elk success figure for unit 540 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 Oka Butte, Suicide Hill and Mount High

Take a position on one of Oka Butte (6,069 ft), Suicide Hill (4,527 ft), Mount High (8,246 ft) and Bluff Mountain (8,233 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 378 mapped stream reaches and 198 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 71/40°F, Oct 56/31°F and Nov 43/21°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, 0.9 in. in Oct and 0.7 in. in Nov, and the graded gravel in this unit turns greasy wet.

Getting past the roads: US 12 and Lode Road

US 12 is the paved frame, which is also where everyone else starts. There are roughly 8.8 miles of genuine four-wheel-drive road in the unit, and the country past the end of them is the part worth your legs.

A first plan from the pins on this page

The map above marks Mount High, Bluff Mountain, Daisy Peak and Bartleson Peak as places to see from, and Daisy Notch, High Park, Daisy Narrows and US 191;MT 3 @ unit boundary 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

582 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 Harlowton, about 16 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. 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.