Unit 8 is the Sandia Mountains—the wall of rock standing straight up over the east side of Albuquerque—and it's about the most unusual tag in New Mexico because it's archery-only and you're hunting deer with a million people watching. The boundary is basically a wedge of interstate and two-lane: I-25 on the west, I-40 along the bottom, then NM 14, the Turquoise Trail, with CR 42 and NM 41 closing it off on the east toward Galisteo and Moriarty. The Sandias themselves are the whole show, climbing from pinyon-juniper foothills up through ponderosa into spruce, fir, and aspen, topping out at Sandia Crest at 10,678 feet, all of it steep, cliffy, and brutal on the legs. North and northeast you've got the smaller Ortiz and San Pedro ranges and humps like South Mountain and Monte Largo, but the deer hunt people draw this for is the late-season January archery hunt right in the Sandias proper, where local bowhunters glass up genuinely mature bucks holding in the dark north-facing timber. It does'nt fish like other units—this is mountain bowhunting fifteen minutes from a Whole Foods. The catch is everything that comes with hunting a city's backyard. Only about 17 percent of the unit is public, and nearly all of the worthwhile ground is Cibola National Forest, with the 37,000-acre Sandia Mountain Wilderness at the core—no vehicles, no motorized anything, so you're hiking the 100-plus miles of foot trails off State Routes 536, 165, and 556 and out of trailheads above Cedar Crest, Tijeras, and Sandia Park. The west-side hotspots like the 10K trail and the telephone-line cut hold deer, but they also hold hikers, mountain bikers, and a fair share of anti-hunters, so people watch their trucks and pick odd hours. HARD FLAG: the Sandia Pueblo owns the lower western foothills of the range and that land is closed to you—stay off it, the boundary runs right where the public forest gets good. Cell service is fine on the west face looking at the city and dies fast once you drop into the canyons on the back. You can sleep in your own bed and still get worked, but dont confuse easy access with easy hunting—the steepness, the crowds, and the private checkerboard around the foothills make this a unit that punishes anyone treating it like a casual after-work walk.