Units / New Mexico / GMU 55A
Unit research · New Mexico GMU 55A
GMU 55A — New Mexico
61% public across 1,007,400 ac. Road access is easy — only 16% of the public land is more than a mile from a road. No landlocked public land.
Computed from primary government data by the open pipeline. See the code →
Tags & season
Draw hunts on this ground.
34 limited-entry bighorn sheep, deer and elk hunts are drawn on GMU 55A: apply in the New Mexico draw, by the agency's deadline below.
Season dates: see New Mexico Department of Game and Fish's regulations
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
Backcountry
Where the ground sits
Tap or hover the bars for each elevation band
Slope mix
Which way the slopes face
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
95,227 ac of this gmu has burned — 9% of the unit. The full report assembles it into one printable document and keeps it current as the facts change.
Season conditions — measured, not vibes
Historical temperatures · 2000–2025
Normals for 2000–2025 — tap or hover for a month
Measured at RATON MUNI/CREWS FIELD APT, 44 km from the unit’s center and ~1,700 ft below its median elevation — expect the unit to run colder. NOAA ISD-Lite hourly observations.
Harvest — agency survey estimates
Deer · 2025 · draw hunts
reported for unit group 55A, 55B
34.8% success
65 taken by 187 hunters
Deer hunter success · 2021–2025 · 20% → 35%
Season breakdown · 2025
| Season | Success | Harvest | Hunters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Archery | 40% | 4 | 10 |
Which season is the value play here — same ground, different odds.
Elk · 2025 · draw hunts
35.1% success
146 taken by 416 hunters
Elk hunter success · 2019–2025 · 37% → 35%
Season breakdown · 2025
| Season | Success | Harvest | Hunters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Archery | 25% | 20 | 81 |
| Muzzleloader | 28% | 7 | 25 |
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
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.
Ready to scout it?
Everything on this page, live on the map — ownership, boundaries, roads, and your own waypoints.
Take GMU 55A 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.
