Unit 26 is the east side of the bootheel—wide-open Chihuahuan desert basin with sky-island mountains poking up out of it, sitting right on the Mexican line at the bottom. The big-name ranges are the Big Hatchets and Little Hatchets near Hachita off NM 81, the Alamo Hueco country, and the Animas Mountains running down the west side of the unit, all of it rocky and steep with brush starting around 5,000 feet and Coues bucks living on the high peaks above 6,000. NM 9 runs the border east-west, NM 81 drops south past Hachita toward the Big Hatchet State Game Refuge, and NM 146 ties the north end together—but these are lonely roads, there's no national forest out here, and once you leave pavement your on your own with no signal and very little water. This is some of the emptiest, most overlooked country in the state, with light pressure and good draw odds precisely because it's a long haul to nowhere. Here's the hard part, and its the whole story in this unit: access. Only about half the unit is genuinely huntable public—roughly 54 percent on paper—but the private down low locks up gate after gate, and the single biggest piece is the Diamond A Ranch (the old Gray Ranch), a 500-square-mile spread in the Animas Valley owned by the Animas Foundation that effectively walls off most of the Animas Mountains. They discourage visitors and dont hand out recreational access, so a big chunk of the best high country is functionally off-limits no matter what the land-status layer says. The desert bighorn here mostly live on a few private ranches too. Hachita, Playas, and Animas are the only specks of civilization, none of them a real town, so fuel up in Deming or Lordsburg before you commit. It's border country—you'll see Border Patrol and the occasional locked gate that wasnt there last year. Come for solitude and a cheap tag on Coues and mule deer, not for easy access, and know exactly where the Diamond A line is before you set foot in the Animas.