Unit 50 is the long skinny one—a roughly 920-square-mile strip in Taos and Rio Arriba counties that runs from down around Espanola all the way north to the Colorado line. Don't picture the towering Sangres here; this is the lower, drier west side of the divide, lots of gently rolling hills, big flats, and pinyon-juniper grading into ponderosa and oak brush only about halfway up the higher ground. It's a public-heavy unit—call it high sixties percent open, a patchwork of BLM, Carson National Forest, and state land—but it checkerboards against private in enough places that you genuinely need an ownership map on your phone before you start cutting across a section. Landmarks guys talk about are Montoso and Pot Mountain; there's no water on top of Montoso but Pot holds some, and Pot is a long ugly climb. Gravel and dirt get you to a lot of it, but plan on 4x4 and plan on rattlesnakes in the early hunts. Here's the honest part: this unit is hard, and the elk are thin. The forum consensus from people who've actually drawn it is bleak—one guy saw a total of six cows in a full week and flat-out told others to swing for the fences and put in somewhere else. Woodcutting around Montoso has shifted elk behavior from how it used to be, and your generally hunting low densities with low success rates compared to the famous northern units next door. The rut can fire as early as the first week of September and stretch about a month, so timing matters more here than in a unit where animals are stacked up. Espanola and Taos bookend it for fuel and supplies, with Tres Piedras a smaller stop up north; cell service is spotty once you're off US 285 and into the rolling juniper. The reward for the work is space and solitude—it just isnt the place to go expecting to trip over bulls.