Roughly? Bismarck. The pay to play grounds around Mott, Regent and New England are more or less insulated from the madness, as are some areas north of Hettinger and around Stranton.
I will tell you for certain, that other than the pay to play operations in SD, ND now has the best pheasant hunting. MT has never had pheasant hunting on the same level as SW ND. Less so now, what with the patch madness.
Ethanol has caused the SD East River farmers to drain every slough and bulldoze every shelterbelt that will give them another acre for corn.
As such, it is just a matter of time before the flood of people going into ND causes landowners to drop out of their PLOTS program and go to daily fees.
Lots of out of staters are in large part what caused ND to go to a specific number of days permitted on a non-resident license about a decade ago and it is what grew the play for play status of SD.
Please! Let no one go ballistic over that last paragraph, but the truth is that the pheasant cover that is productive is no where near the miles and miles of prairie on the High Plains and being finite it will only accommodate so many hunters. As the traveling hunter finds less in SD and MT he will concentrate on ND and ND will respond to the pressure.
