Units / Washington / GMU 653
Unit research · Washington GMU 653
White River — Washington
54% public across 248,222 ac. Road access is easy — only 15% of the public land is more than a mile from a road. Almost none of the public land is landlocked.
Computed from primary government data by the open pipeline. See the code →
Tags & season
Draw hunts on this ground.
5 limited-entry deer and elk hunts are drawn on GMU 653: apply in the Washington draw, by the agency's deadline below.
Season dates: see Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's regulations
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
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
24,171 ac of this gmu has burned — 10% 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 STAMPASS PASS FLTWO, 36 km from the unit’s center and ~800 ft above its median elevation — expect the unit to run warmer. NOAA ISD-Lite hourly observations.
Harvest — agency survey estimates
Deer · 2025 · general season
19.6% success
116 taken by 591 hunters
Deer hunter success · 2018–2025 · 13% → 20%
Season breakdown · 2025
| Season | Success | Harvest | Hunters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Archery | 0% | 0 | 110 |
Which season is the value play here — same ground, different odds.
Elk · 2025 · general season
25.7% success
38 taken by 148 hunters
Elk hunter success · 2019–2025 · 16% → 26%
Season breakdown · 2025
| Season | Success | Harvest | Hunters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Archery | 41% | 14 | 34 |
| Muzzleloader | 30% | 17 | 57 |
Which season is the value play here — same ground, different odds.
Black bear · 2025 · general season
6.1% success
9 taken by 148 hunters
Black bear hunter success · 2013–2025 · 1% → 6%
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
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 653 into the field
Download Washington’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.
