Unit 21B is a big sprawling southern-New Mexico unit—around 2,550 square miles whose edges clip five counties, with the heart of it in Sierra County on the east side of the Black Range. Forget the timbered-elk picture; this is desert-grassland and low desert-mountain country, isolated rocky ranges shoving up out of flat valley floors. Down low it's creosote and rolling hills, then mesquite and juniper on steep, sandy-arroyo mountainsides, with pinyon-juniper and a few ponderosa hanging on in the canyon bottoms and highest peaks up north. Elevations run from about 4,000 feet on the desert floor to around 7,800 on the high points. NM 152, the Black Range Highway, is the main artery through the southern part with dirt branching off it, and the northern roads tie into the Monticello and Cuchillo country. Most of those dirt roads want four-wheel-drive, and the unit has decent road access on paper—the problem isnt getting in, it's that the private ground is scattered everywhere and a lot of it is poorly marked. That access reality is the whole story on 21B. It runs about 62 percent public—BLM and state sections sprinkled through—but the boundaries between public and private blur on the ground, so you have to know exactly whose dirt you're standing on or you'll either trespass or get run off legal ground by mistake. Game-wise, this is a mule deer unit before anything else; it's produced some good bucks and carries decent numbers, with antelope out in the grasslands around Cuchillo and Monticello and pockets of Coues whitetail down in the southern end. Elk numbers are low—dont draw 21B chasing a bull. The bigger deer tag allocation means more trucks and more orange, so the people who do well here backpack off the roads to put country between themselves and the crowd. Truth or Consequences off I-25 is your full-service town, with Hillsboro, Chloride, and the little Monticello-Cuchillo communities as your last-gas reference points. Cell service holds near the highways and the bigger towns and then quits hard once you drop into the ranges, so plan your maps and your water before you leave the pavement—this is dry country and the heat does'nt forgive a thin water plan.