Unit 10 is the Zuni Mountains, straddling the McKinley-Cibola line south of I-40 between Gallup and Grants, and it's a different animal than the rolling PJ units to its south. This is the high, timbered backbone—a long chain of flat-topped mesas running 7,500 to 8,000-plus feet, draped in thick ponderosa and pinyon-juniper, with Cibola National Forest making up the bulk of the public ground. The play here isn't glassing big open basins; it's getting on top of those mesas and working the coolest, darkest north slopes and the little spring-fed canyons and grassy pockets where elk tuck in. Calling matters more than spotting because you often cant see fifty yards through the timber. It carries its own standalone Zuni elk herd, separate from the bigger Mt. Taylor bunch to the east, and that's part of what makes it tempting on paper. Here's the honest part: this is a feast-or-famine unit and the success numbers are some of the lowest in the state—archery rates have sat down around the mid-teens in lean years, and plenty of guys cover serious miles and go home skunked. The intel online is thin too; the people who've figured the Zunis out tend to keep quiet about it. Public access runs off a web of Cibola NF roads, but only about a third of the unit is truly open public—the rest is checkerboarded state, private, and tribal ground, so an onX subscription earns it's keep here keeping you off the wrong side of a fence. Forest Road 50 and the network around McGaffey and Bluewater are your main arteries, fuel's back in Grants or Gallup, and cell service quits not long after you leave the interstate frontage. The dirt is decent when dry and slick clay when it's not, so an October storm can strand you up on a mesa fast. Come for solitude and a real mountain hunt, not for easy odds.