The sheer size of Colorado’s elk herds might make Wyoming envious, but the corresponding hordes of hunters in the Centennial State could make Wyoming feel grateful.
In a move partly intended to trim the number of hunters piling into Colorado every fall, that state’s game commission last week decided to discontinue over-the-counter archery elk tags for non-residents.
That could put an entirely new spin on the dynamics of Western hunting, avid hunter Owen Miller told Cowboy State Daily.
For many years, Colorado was the best last option for elk hunters who failed to draw elk tags anywhere else, he said.
“You could always get your over-the-counter Colorado archery tags,” said Miller, who lives in northeast Wyoming. “But when everybody does that, it’s going to flood your state with hunters.”
Crowd control might seem like a good reason to restrict non-resident tags, but the idea could also backfire, outfitter Earl Oesterling told Cowboy State Daily.
It could end up driving up all Colorado elk tag prices and make it much more difficult for both resident and non-resident hunters to draw tags for some of the state’s premier hunting areas, he added.
Oesterling owns Ivory & Antler Outfitters which guides hunters mostly in Colorado’s North Park area, near the Wyoming state line.
Over-The-Counter Vs. Draw
Like in Wyoming, hunting tags fall into two broad categories – draw and over-the-counter (OTC).
OTC is exactly what it sounds like. It means that hunters can walk into any business that sells hunting licenses, such as a sporting goods store, and simply buy their tag right then and there. And it doesn’t matter if the hunting season has already started.
Then, they can go out and start hunting in any “general” hunt area or areas that allow the use of OTC tags.
Draw tags must be applied for and paid for months in advance. They are for areas that have limited quotas or a limited number of hunting tags available. That means applying for a tag doesn’t guarantee the hunter will draw that tag because there are always more applicants than tags available for any particular hunt area.
In some instances, hunters can collect “preference points.” Those are points that can be built up every time a hunter applies for certain tags or hunt areas. Hunters can opt to keep letting those points build up or use them to increase their odds of drawing a tag in areas where the preference points apply.
This time of year, folks might notice increased chatter from hunters on social media about “checking my draw results” or “got my draw results and did (or did not) get that tag I wanted.”
Hunters who don’t draw tags will have their money refunded, minus a small processing fee.
And many will then opt for falling back on general OTC tags. Colorado was long seen as a fallback state for hunters who did not get a Wyoming draw tag, Miller said.
Colorado Has Quantity, Wyoming Has Quality
With an estimated 280,000 elk, Colorado has by far the most Wapiti of any state.
However, many of those elk are often in urban areas, where hunting isn’t feasible.
For quite a while now, Colorado has had a reputation for great hunting — simply because of the sheer number of elk. But it lags behind Wyoming in terms of its reputation for producing huge trophy bulls, or offering deep wilderness adventure hunting, Oesterling said.
“Colorado is all about quantity, he said. “If you compare the two, Wyoming has better backcountry hunting.”
Typically, Colorado has been a good place to go if the goal was primarily to just get in a hunt, but not worry too much about finding a trophy, Miller said.
“When we were hunting down there, we would look for the first legal bull we can find and kill it,” he said.
Will It Backfire On Colorado Hunters?
Oesterling said he understands the sentiment about wanting to cut down on the crowds during archery hunting season. But simply cutting off over-the-counter tags isn’t the way to go about doing it, he said.
That could end up just putting more pressure on some hunting areas, prompting people to apply for more draw tags.
It might also worsen what hunters call “point creep,” he said. That means as more and more hunters apply for any area with preference points, the number of points needed to have a reasonable chance of drawing a tag will increase – according to the basic principle of supply and demand.
“Say a hunt area’s quota was 100 tags, and the number of applicants wasn’t much more, it might have taken only one preference point to draw that tag,” he said.
“But say the number of tags was cut to 80, because the game population went down. And now there’s 300 people applying for it. Now, it might take three preference points to draw that tag,” he added.
In short, by trying to create less competition by scaling back on the number of nonresident hunters, Colorado archery hunters might inadvertently diminish their opportunities.
Monster Bulls Here And There
Miller said that even though the new rules might make it tougher to get tags for any future Colorado hunting trips he might take, he actually supports Colorado’s discontinuance of over-the-counter archery elk tags for non-residents.
Less pressure on the elk herds, particularly during archery seasons, will give more bull elk better chances of surviving the season and grow larger, he said.
That might be why Wyoming has a better reputation for trophy bulls, Miller said. Nonresident archery elk tags have been draw-only here for a while.
The fact that Wyoming already has only draw tags for nonresidents means there probably won’t be a rush of frustrated hunters headed for Wyoming instead of Colorado, he added.
But it could boost Colorado’s reputation and ability to produce trophy quality bulls.
And it’s not as if there just aren’t any huge bull elk at all in Colorado.
Miller knows that firsthand..
He recalled a time he was hunting in the state, and was about to pull the trigger on one of those “first legal bulls” when a real monster appeared.
“He stood up out of a group of cows, bugled and came running at those smaller bulls I was focused on,” Miller said.
He has a taxidermy mount of the big Colorado bull’s head and antlers, but said he’s never had the antlers officially scored.
But According to his well-trained eye, he guesses the antlers to be about 355-360 inches by the Boone & Crockett (B&C) measuring standards. And a 360 B&C elk is a trophy bull, by any state’s standards.
Over the long run, Colorado’s decision to limit non-resident’s tags might produce more bulls like that, Miller said.
“Give it a few years, and you’re going to see the quality of their elk herds go up,” he said.
