Unit 27 is the far southwest toe of the bootheel, the slice of Hidalgo County pinned between the Arizona line on the west and Mexico on the south. The whole show is the Peloncillo Mountains running north-south along the AZ border, plus the little Guadalupe range and Guadalupe Canyon right on the Mexican line—desert peaks that jump up off a 4,000-foot floor to just under 7,000 at Gray Mountain. It's classic sky-island Coues and desert bighorn country, dry as a bone with only a scatter of springs and a few man-made tanks, and it's put several rams and whitetail bucks into the Boone and Crockett book over the years. NM 80 is your spine, with access into the Peloncillos off Road Forks and a dirt road just north of Steins Pass; Rodeo is the only settlement and Lordsburg is where you actually buy gas and groceries. Once your off NM 80 the cell signal is gone and the forest roads mostly just run along the mountain bases rather than into them. The thing that defines 27 is how little of it you can actually hunt. It pencils out around 67 percent public, but that number lies—the Coronado National Forest pieces are nearly landlocked by private, and the Diamond A Ranch (formerly the Gray Ranch) covers something like 500 square miles and chokes off access across a huge swath of the unit. Add the international border and the state line and you've got a place where figuring out a legal way in is harder than the actual hunting. This is rugged, remote, low-pressure ground with genuine trophy potential, but it rewards the guy who does his homework on access maps and boundaries before he ever leaves home. Expect Border Patrol traffic, expect locked gates, and expect to glass a lot of steep rock for a few good animals. It's not a unit you road-hunt your way into—its a unit you earn.