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Units / Washington / GMU 278

Unit research · Washington GMU 278

Wahluke — Washington

19% public across 542,024 ac. Road access is easy — only 8% of the public land is more than a mile from a road. Watch the checkerboard: 8,704 ac of public land has no public route in.

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GMU 278Full map — ownership, roads, wind →
390–2,600 ft

elevation range

19%

public land

8%

of public >1 mi from a road

8,704 ac

landlocked public

1.72

road miles per mi²

573 mi

maintained trails

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

Tags & season

Tags: check Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

No draw hunts are published for this gmu. Tag type, quotas and season dates are in Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's regulations.

Plus: Washington big game hunting licence$61.70 resident · $599.07 nonresident

Season dates: see Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's regulations

WDFW — Big game hunting licences and tags (2026)

Fees and draw dates from Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, 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: WDFW — Big game hunting licences and tags (2026) · WDFW — Special hunt permits.

Land & access

SFW 7%BLM 5%FWS 5%■ Other public 3%□ Private 81%
Unit area542,024 ac
Public land105,444 ac (19%)
Landlocked public8,704 ac (8.3%)
Motorized routes (MVUM + roads)1,453 mi
Maintained trails573 mi

Backcountry

Public land >1 mi from a road8,411 ac (8% of public)
Road density1.72 mi/mi²
Managed bySFW 38k ac · BLM 27k ac · FWS 27k ac
Elevation390–2,600 ft
Median elevation1,070 ft
Median slope

Where the ground sits

390 ft2,600 ft

Tap or hover the bars for each elevation band

Slope mix

Which way the slopes face

N 35%
E 14%
S 33%
W 18%

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

99,899 ac of this gmu has burned — 18% 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, °F35° high24° lowJFMAMJJASOND

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

Measured at GRANT COUNTY INTL AIRPORT, 41 km from the unit’s center. NOAA ISD-Lite hourly observations.

Harvest — agency survey estimates

Deer · 2025 · general season

26.2% success

95 taken by 362 hunters

Deer hunter success · 2018–2025 · 22% → 26%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery16%1384
Muzzleloader37%719

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

Elk · 2025 · general season

6.4% success

8 taken by 125 hunters

Elk hunter success · 2018–2025 · 0% → 6%

Season breakdown · 2025
SeasonSuccessHarvestHunters
Archery24%833
Muzzleloader0%044

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

Black bear · 2025 · general season

0% success

0 taken by 17 hunters

Black bear hunter success · 2023–2025 · 0% → 0%

Harvest estimates from WDFW's hunter reports, published per GAME MANAGEMENT UNIT as HTML tables — the only state we carry that publishes harvest as structured markup rather than as a PDF whose layout has to be recovered from whitespace. Success rates are WDFW's own and are carried verbatim. METHOD IS THE VARIANT. Archery, Modern Firearm and Muzzleloader are separate seasons with separate tags in Washington, so a hunter appears in exactly one and the 'all' row is their sum. "Multiple Weapons" is its own tag type rather than a total, and is carried as its own variant. ⚠️ TWO TABLE SHAPES. Deer and elk put the GMU in the table's caption with one row per method beneath; black bear puts the GMU in the row's first cell with no method column. WDFW also upper-cases unit names in the deer and elk reports ("101 - SHERMAN") and title-cases them in the bear reports ("501 - Lincoln") — an uppercase-only pattern reads deer and elk perfectly and silently skips every bear table. General-season reports only. WDFW's special-permit tables carry harvest by point class but no hunter count and no success rate, so they cannot be turned into a rate and are not ingested; the general-season tables cover the same units. Deer and elk carry eight seasons and black bear thirteen — the older deer and elk reports use a layout this reader does not handle and are omitted whole rather than in part. Source: WDFW Game Harvest Reports (per GMU, per season).

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

Desert · GMU 29043% public · 37% remoteRingold · GMU 3797% public · 14% remoteAlkali · GMU 3712% public · 2% remoteRattlesnake Hills · GMU 37233% public · 51% remoteQuilomene · GMU 32979% public · 12% remoteBeezley · GMU 27216% public · 11% 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.