OpenHunt for Android is on Google Play — take your plan into the field. Send it to your phone →

Units / New Mexico / GMU 30

Unit research · New Mexico GMU 30

GMU 30 — New Mexico

78% public across 1,883,457 ac. Road access is easy — only 12% of the public land is more than a mile from a road. Almost none of the public land is landlocked.

Open in map
Watch this unit — freeReturned and leftover tags, new legal closures, fire near the unit, weather warnings — by email. One unit free, no card.
GMU 30Full map — ownership, roads, wind →
3,090–7,410 ft

elevation range

78%

public land

12%

of public >1 mi from a road

5,531 ac

landlocked public

1.24

road miles per mi²

1,108 mi

maintained trails

Computed from primary government data by the open pipeline. See the code →

Tags & season

Draw hunts on this ground.

19 limited-entry barbary-sheep, deer, elk and pronghorn hunts are drawn on GMU 30: apply in the New Mexico draw, by the agency's deadline below.

barbary-sheep tag · 8 draw hunts (2026)$137.00 resident · $386.00 nonresident
Deer tag · 6 draw hunts (2026)$67.00 resident · $411.00 nonresident
Elk tag · 4 draw hunts (2026)$107.00 resident · $786.00 nonresident
Pronghorn tag · 1 draw hunt (2026)$77.00 resident · $436.00 nonresident
Plus: New Mexico Game-Hunting Licence$25.00 resident · $90.00 nonresident

Season dates: see New Mexico Department of Game and Fish's regulations

NMDGF — Draw Hunt License Fees (2026-2027)

Fees and draw dates from New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, 2026, verified 2026-08-15 — past its verify-by date, confirm with the agency. Tag type from the agency's published draw statistics: a gmu that appears in none of them has no limited-entry hunt we know of. Source: NMDGF — Draw Hunt License Fees (2026-2027) · NMDGF — Big-game and draw hunts (fee collection and refunds).

Land & access

BLM 46%USFS 15%SLB 14%■ Other public 3%□ Private 22%
Unit area1,883,457 ac
Public land1,465,490 ac (78%)
Landlocked public5,531 ac (0.4%)
Deer draw pressure0.61 tags/mi² public (0.47 of total area)
Pronghorn draw pressure0.007 tags/mi² public (0.006 of total area)
Motorized routes (MVUM + roads)3,640 mi
Maintained trails1,108 mi

Backcountry

Public land >1 mi from a road175,208 ac (12% of public)
Road density1.24 mi/mi²
Managed byBLM 865k ac · USFS 284k ac · SLB 269k ac
Elevation3,090–7,410 ft
Median elevation4,520 ft
Median slope

Where the ground sits

3,090 ft7,410 ft

Tap or hover the bars for each elevation band

Slope mix

Which way the slopes face

N 27%
E 26%
S 25%
W 22%

Share of ground steeper than 5° — flat ground has no facing

North slopes hold shade, cover and snow; south slopes open first.

USGS 3DEP 1 arc-second (30 m), slope at native resolution in a local metric projection, sampled on a 200 m grid. See the code →

Unit intelligence report

259,221 ac of this gmu has burned — 14% of the unit. The full report assembles it into one printable document and keeps it current as the facts change.

Open the report →

Season conditions — measured, not vibes

Historical temperatures · 2000–2025

Monthly normal highs and lows, °F58° high31° lowJFMAMJJASOND

Normals for 2000–2025 — tap or hover for a month

Measured at CAVERN CITY AIR TRML ARPT, 52 km from the unit’s center and ~1,300 ft below its median elevation — expect the unit to run colder. NOAA ISD-Lite hourly observations.

Harvest — agency survey estimates

Deer · 2025 · draw hunts

18.9% success

232 taken by 1,226 hunters

Deer hunter success · 2021–2025 · 17% → 19%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery12%35288
Muzzleloader22%64286

Which season is the value play here — same ground, different odds.

Elk · 2025 · draw hunts

46.7% success

42 taken by 90 hunters

Elk hunter success · 2019–2025 · 49% → 47%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery47%817

Which season is the value play here — same ground, different odds.

Pronghorn · 2025 · draw hunts

8.3% success

2 taken by 24 hunters

Pronghorn hunter success · 2024–2025 · 46% → 8%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery8%224

Which season is the value play here — same ground, different odds.

barbary sheep · 2019 · draw hunts

reported for unit group 29, 30

51.6% success

386 taken by 748 hunters

Season breakdown · 2019
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery19%948

Which season is the value play here — same ground, different odds.

KEYED BY HUNT CODE, which is what makes New Mexico only the third state where a draw hunt ties to its own harvest. The same ELK-1-132 that appears in the drawing odds appears in the harvest report with what it killed; before this, only Colorado and Arizona managed that, and Colorado has one season of it. Success rates are published by NMDGF and carried verbatim; nothing here is derived. The harvest columns are headed "Estimated Harvest" — extrapolated by the department from the hunters who filed a report — so they will not divide exactly into the published rate, and the reader accepts either denominator rather than pretending to a precision the source does not have. UNITS COME FROM THE DRAW TABLE, not from these reports. NMDGF prints the GMU rotated, and pdftotext splits a single "Public" into "Pu" and "blic" on separate lines beside the rows it labels. Both publications key on the hunt code, so the unit is joined across instead — which also means a season older than the odds archive has no unit to attach to and is not carried. Lettered sub-units are real units: "Unit 2" in a hunt description means 2A, 2B and 2C, so a hunt is keyed to the group of them exactly as Nevada's unit groups are. ONLY THE SEASONS THAT PARSE COMPLETELY ARE SHIPPED. Every species has its own layout and several changed mid-archive; a file where more than 15% of rows fail to reproduce NMDGF's own published success rate is discarded whole rather than in part, because the artifact aggregates hunts to a unit and a half-read year would quietly bias that unit's rate toward whichever hunts happened to parse. Deer carries five seasons and elk seven on that basis; the discarded years are a reader limitation, not an absence of data. Source: NMDGF Harvest Reports (per species, per season) · NMDGF Big Game Drawing Odds, Complete Report (the hunt-code to unit join).

How these numbers are made

public_land_pct = public_area / unit_area
landlocked = public ∖ reachable(roads, corners)
remote = public ∖ buffer(roads, 1 mi)

Computed, not curated: no paid research team, no opinions dressed as data. If a number looks wrong, file an issue — the fix ships for everyone.

Nearby GMUs

GMU 2984% public · 19% remoteGMU 3467% public · 6% remoteGMU 3358% public · 42% remoteGMU 3148% public · 42% remoteGMU 3233% public · 8% remoteGMU 2889% public · 20% remote

Ready to scout it?

Everything on this page, live on the map — ownership, boundaries, roads, and your own waypoints.

Take GMU 30 into the field

Download New Mexico’s pack and this unit works with no signal — boundaries, ownership, roads, elevation. Record your hunt with the screen off. Check what’s visible from any ridge.

Scan to install OpenHunt for Android. Open this page on the phone afterwards and it lands in the app.

QR code for openhuntmaps.com/appGet it on Google Play
Open GMU 30 in the map
Watch this unit — freeReturned and leftover tags, new legal closures, fire near the unit, weather warnings — by email. One unit free, no card.