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Units / New Mexico / GMU 39

Unit research · New Mexico GMU 39

GMU 39 — New Mexico

18% public across 1,688,071 ac. Road access is easy — only 21% of the public land is more than a mile from a road. Watch the checkerboard: 36,225 ac of public land has no public route in.

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Deer draw odds (5)Elk draw odds (1)Pronghorn draw odds (6)Odds and pins: free, no account
GMU 39Full map — ownership, roads, wind →
4,010–7,510 ft

elevation range

18%

public land

21%

of public >1 mi from a road

36,225 ac

landlocked public

1.08

road miles per mi²

559 mi

maintained trails

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

Tags & season

Draw hunts on this ground.

12 limited-entry deer, elk and pronghorn hunts are drawn on GMU 39: apply in the New Mexico draw, by the agency's deadline below.

Deer tag · 5 draw hunts (2026)$67.00 resident · $411.00 nonresident
Elk tag · 1 draw hunt (2026)$107.00 resident · $786.00 nonresident
Pronghorn tag · 6 draw hunts (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

SLB 16%BLM 2%USBR 0%□ Private 82%
Unit area1,688,071 ac
Public land301,990 ac (18%)
Landlocked public36,225 ac (12.0%)
Deer draw pressure0.15 tags/mi² public (0.024 of total area)
Pronghorn draw pressure0.072 tags/mi² public (0.011 of total area)
Motorized routes (MVUM + roads)2,838 mi
Maintained trails559 mi

Backcountry

Public land >1 mi from a road64,396 ac (21% of public)
Road density1.08 mi/mi²
Managed bySLB 262k ac · BLM 33k ac · USBR 6k ac
Elevation4,010–7,510 ft
Median elevation5,700 ft
Median slope

Where the ground sits

4,010 ft7,510 ft

Tap or hover the bars for each elevation band

Slope mix

Which way the slopes face

N 28%
E 22%
S 28%
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

3,895 ac of this gmu has burned — 0% 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, °F70° high35° lowJFMAMJJASOND

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

Blank months have no publishable normal at this station.

Measured at MORIARTY AIRPORT, 79 km from the unit’s center and ~500 ft above its median elevation — expect the unit to run warmer. NOAA ISD-Lite hourly observations.

Harvest — agency survey estimates

Deer · 2025 · draw hunts

20.3% success

235 taken by 1,155 hunters

Deer hunter success · 2021–2025 · 23% → 20%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery26%61236
Muzzleloader15%21143

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

Pronghorn · 2025 · draw hunts

85.3% success

209 taken by 245 hunters

Pronghorn hunter success · 2024–2025 · 80% → 85%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery67%1218

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 4326% public · 8% remoteGMU 3829% public · 20% remoteGMU 429% public · 9% remoteGMU 818% public · 20% remoteGMU 1418% public · 14% remoteGMU 3233% public · 8% remote

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Watch this unit — freeReturned and leftover tags, new legal closures, fire near the unit, weather warnings — by email. One unit free, no card.