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

Units / New Mexico / GMU 6C

Unit research · New Mexico GMU 6C

GMU 6C — New Mexico

61% public across 777,755 ac. Road access is easy — only 14% 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.
Bighorn sheep draw odds (1)Deer draw odds (4)Elk draw odds (7)Odds and pins: free, no account
GMU 6CFull map — ownership, roads, wind →
5,240–11,500 ft

elevation range

61%

public land

14%

of public >1 mi from a road

862 ac

landlocked public

2.51

road miles per mi²

2,122 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 bighorn sheep, deer and elk hunts are drawn on GMU 6C: apply in the New Mexico draw, by the agency's deadline below.

Bighorn sheep tag · 1 draw hunt (2026)$167.00 resident · $3,536.00 nonresident
Deer tag · 4 draw hunts (2026)$67.00 resident · $411.00 nonresident
Elk tag · 7 draw hunts (2026)$107.00 resident · $786.00 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

USFS 45%BLM 7%NPS 4%■ Other public 5%□ Private 39%
Unit area777,755 ac
Public land477,095 ac (61%)
Landlocked public862 ac (0.2%)
Elk draw pressure0.58 tags/mi² public (0.35 of total area)
Motorized routes (MVUM + roads)3,047 mi
Maintained trails2,122 mi

Backcountry

Public land >1 mi from a road65,513 ac (14% of public)
Road density2.51 mi/mi²
Managed byUSFS 351k ac · BLM 52k ac · NPS 34k ac
Elevation5,240–11,500 ft
Median elevation6,760 ft
Median slope

Where the ground sits

5,240 ft11,500 ft

Tap or hover the bars for each elevation band

Slope mix

Which way the slopes face

N 26%
E 29%
S 23%
W 23%

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

156,479 ac of this gmu has burned — 20% of the unit. USGS migration corridors cover 11%. 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, °F44° high22° lowJFMAMJJASOND

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

Measured at SANTA FE MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, 36 km from the unit’s center and ~500 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 6A, 6C

36.8% success

171 taken by 465 hunters

Deer hunter success · 2021–2025 · 32% → 37%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery41%48117
Muzzleloader49%51105

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

Elk · 2025 · draw hunts

26.1% success

268 taken by 1,025 hunters

Elk hunter success · 2019–2025 · 30% → 26%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery15%66442
Muzzleloader35%50143

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 6B100% public · 37% remoteGMU 6A48% public · 9% remoteGMU 4575% public · 32% remoteGMU 51A86% public · 2% remoteGMU 5B81% public · 4% remoteGMU 818% public · 20% remote

Ready to scout it?

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

Take GMU 6C 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 6C 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.