HD 404 covers the country around Ekalaka in southeast Montana—Carter County, the Long Pines, the Chalk Buttes, and the rolling sage-and-pine breaks country approaching the South Dakota border. Elevations run from about 3,000 feet on the Box Elder Creek bottom up to 4,500 feet on the higher pine-covered buttes (Capitol Rock, the Chalk Buttes, the Long Pines ridges). The country is one of the most distinctive in Montana—isolated ponderosa-pine ridges rising abruptly out of sage prairie like green islands in a brown sea, with sandstone-and-chalk outcrops, juniper-and-mountain mahogany draws, and cottonwood corridors along the seasonal creeks. The Long Pines and the Ekalaka Hills look more like the Black Hills than typical Montana prairie, and they hold a real elk population—elk in country that shouldn't have elk. Mule deer in the timber-sage interface, whitetail in the bottoms, pronghorn on the prairie, Merriam's turkeys in the pines. Custer Gallatin NF (Sioux Ranger District) covers the public timber on the Long Pines and Chalk Buttes, with BLM tracts scattered through and the bulk of the surrounding country private ranches. Block Management is critical and the program has decent participation in Carter County. Limited road access—a network of county and BLM dirt roads, all of which gumbo to slick clay when wet. MT-7 from Baker is the principal paved approach. Ekalaka is the only town inside the unit—gas, the Wagon Wheel cafe, the Carter County Museum (the dinosaur collection is genuinely worth a stop), basic groceries, the bar. Baker is north, Belle Fourche SD east. Cell service is patchy in Ekalaka and gone in the country. The country rewards self-sufficient hunters who pre-plan around weather windows.