Unit S124 (Swan Range — Bob Marshall Wilderness South)

Montana FWP calls bighorn sheep district 124 Paradise, and at roughly 59 square miles it's one of the smallest sheep districts in the state. FWP publishes a legal boundary for it and nothing else — no distribution map, no count, no account of where the rams winter. What follows is a read of the ground inside that boundary, and the judgement about where to start is ours rather than the agency's.

The shape of the district

FWP draws the unit inside Sanders County, running the line from the Flathead Indian Reservation boundary along State Route 28, southwest to State Route 200, down Boyer Creek to the north shore of the Clark Fork River, then southeast along that shore and the north shore of the Flathead River back to the reservation boundary near Knowles Creek. Two things follow from that. The district is a river-bounded wedge rather than a block of mountain, and its southern and eastern edges are water you can see from a road. The reservation boundary is a hard edge — tribal land isn't open on a state licence, and the line matters more here than the contours do.

The only public high ground: Deemer Peak and Henry Peak

Two named summits sit inside the line. Deemer Peak reaches 6,245 feet and Henry Peak 6,053 feet, and both carry a National Forest flag in our land-status data. They're the high ground, the public ground and the glassing ground all at once, which makes the district unusually simple to plan and unusually crowded where it counts. Below them the named country is Hugo Canyon at 3,246 feet and Paradise Gulch at 2,520 feet, and both of those read as private in the same data.

What the data doesn't cover

No mapped spring, stream reach or stock tank falls inside this boundary in the water layer we hold, and the logistics pipeline has no record for the district. That's an absence of data, not an absence of water — the Clark Fork and the Flathead run along two of its edges. Treat the land-status read as a starting point and check a current ownership layer before you plan an approach, because on a district this small the difference between public and private is most of the hunt.