Buying Land in Catron County, New Mexico

New Mexico's largest county, and one of its emptiest

Catron County covers about 6,929 square miles, making it New Mexico's largest county by land area, while holding a 2020 census population of roughly 3,579 -- the state's third-least populous county. That works out to a population density of roughly half a person per square mile. The reason so few people live across so much land is straightforward: less than 20% of Catron County's land is privately owned, with the remainder held by the federal government (principally the Gila National Forest, along with parts of the Apache and Cibola National Forests) and the State of New Mexico. For a land buyer, that means a specific Catron parcel is unusually likely to border, or sit surrounded by, public forest land -- which is a real amenity for some intended uses and a real access-and-boundary question for others.

No countywide zoning ordinance for Catron County turned up in county records research -- the county's current land-use framework centers on a Comprehensive/Capital Improvement Plan adopted in 2007, alongside a set of narrower ordinances covering water planning and riparian management, emergency water management, and an environmental planning and review process, rather than a zoning code with mapped districts and a permitted-use table. Confirm this directly with the county before assuming it as settled fact for a specific use, since a rural county can adopt zoning at any time.

Catron's documented history of asserting local control over federal land

Catron County has a genuinely distinct, well-documented history worth understanding if you're buying land adjacent to or surrounded by the Gila or Apache National Forest here. Beginning in 1991, Catron County led a movement -- eventually joined by dozens of mostly Western counties and sometimes called the "county supremacy" or "Sagebrush Rebellion II" movement -- that adopted ordinances purporting to assert county authority or management rights over federal land within county borders, invoking property-rights and public-safety rationale. That movement's legal footing did not hold up well in court, and it was largely dormant by the mid-1990s following adverse federal court rulings.

What this means practically for a buyer: don't treat any Catron County ordinance asserting local authority over adjacent federal land as something that actually controls your access to, or use of, that federal land -- the U.S. Forest Service remains the managing authority for the Gila, Apache, and Cibola National Forest land here regardless of county ordinance language. If your intended use depends on access across or adjacent to national forest land, confirm road status, easements, and permitted uses directly with the relevant Forest Service ranger district rather than relying on county-level assertions of authority.

The Gila National Forest: a genuine hunting and public-land draw

The Gila National Forest -- at roughly 3.3 million acres, the sixth-largest national forest in the country -- covers a substantial share of Catron County, and every elk hunting unit within it falls inside the county, including wilderness units accessible only by non-motorized means or, outside the formal wilderness, by four-wheel-drive on Forest Service roads the agency itself calls "dry weather" routes rather than reliable year-round access. Public-land elk tags here go through the state draw system, but a Catron landowner has a second, potentially more valuable option worth knowing about: New Mexico's EPLUS program, which lets enrolled ranch and forest-edge property convert elk pressure into salable private hunting authorizations, plus a real 2026 court ruling on the state's liability for elk damage -- see our dedicated page for both.