jj:
PICKING A HUNTING AREA: Picking an area to hunt is the easiest and the most difficult part of hunting. There are literally millions of acres of public land located in National Forests and on BLM land. So it’s easy to find a place where it's legal to hunt. But finding "the right place" to hunt is more difficult.
Most Western hunters are not going to tell you where their honey holes are located. You're going to have to find your own spot. But there's lots of info available and if you do your home work, you might be able to find a good place to start. If you want to hunt in Colorado, here's how to locate an area.
Get a copy of a road map of Colorado that indicates which land is public. Compare that to the map of game management units in the Colorado Big Game Hunting brochure. Look for units with lots of public land.
Next, look on the CO P&W big game web page for the recap of preference points required to get a license in limited draw units.
http://cpw.state.co.us/thingstodo/Pages/Statistics.aspxThere are more licenses offered than there are applicants in those units that require zero points. Those are places where game populations are at or above management objectives. Look for units which require zero points and have lots of public land.
Then, go to the interactive game management unit maps.
http://ndismaps.nrel.colostate.edu/huntingatlas/index.aspx?keyword=gmu&value=54 . There you can find winter ranges, calving areas and summer ranges in each GMU. Finally get a copy of the USGS map(s) for the area and memorize it. With all that info, you ought to be able to pick an area where there are lots of elk and lots of public land. And then you should be able to determine where they are in summer, where their winter range is located, the most likely routes that they use to get from one area to the other, and therefore where they are most likely to be during hunting season.
If you want to put in for the computer draw, here's a link that gives draw expectations.
http://cpw.state.co.us/thingstodo/Pages/Statistics.aspxI’m not familiar with the resources available in other western states, but I would wager that there’s similar info available in all of them.
THE DRAWING SYSTEM IN COLORADO: Learning how the drawing process works is an important part of learning how to hunt elk in Colorado. The state is divided into game management units (GMU). Each year the game managers determine a quota for each species in each GMU and from that determine how many licenses of each species they will issue in order to manage each population. It's a very complicated system. Here's a simplified (maybe over-simplified) summary.
Over-the-counter bull elk tags can be purchased at sporting goods stores, some department stores, gun shops, Parks & Wildlife offices, etc. The number of those licenses is unlimited and they are valid in about half of the GMUs west of I-25. Low probability of success on OTC bull tags but each year a few tags are filled that way. Sometimes it just takes luck.
Cow elk tags are issued only through the draw (there are some exceptions but let's keep it simple for this introductory narrative). There are many GMUs where there are more cow tags offered than there are applicants. The extra tags are called leftover tags and they are offered first-come first-serve at Parks & Wildlife offices in early August. You have a much better chance of bagging a cow elk than you do of tagging out on a bull. A lot of people will hunt for cow elk in a unit where they eventually hope to hunt for bulls and in the process they learn the unit and are ready for the day that they get a bull tag. It probably makes most sense for a nonresident to apply for an either-sex tag.
If you apply for the draw and if you don't get what you applied for you get a preference point. You can also apply for a preference point. Each time that you are unsuccessful you get another point. People with the most points are awarded licenses before people with fewer points.
There are several GMUs where the OTC bull tags are not valid and bull tags are issued through the draw. You can draw a bull tag in some of those units with only a few preference points and some have pretty good success for representative bulls. These units are where a lot of elk hunters get their bulls.
There are a hand full of premium units that are managed to produce trophy bulls and there are only a few tags issued each year. Success rates are very high and quality is very high. In those units it now takes a couple of decades worth of points to draw a license and the number of points required increases slowly. It will eventually get to the point where it takes so many points that those units will be defacto once-in-a-lifetime units.
You can apply for up to four choices on the application. Each year I apply for a preference point as my first choice. Second and subsequent choices do not use up your points. My second choice is a cow tag in a unit that has historically had leftover cow tags so I'm pretty sure I'll get that tag and it's also in a unit where OTC bull tags are valid. So each year I get another preference point and I go into the field with a cow tag and a bull tag. I shoot the first cow that I see and spend the rest of the season looking for a bull. I now have 18 preference points for elk. I've shot 32 elk since 1978, although only eight of them have been bulls and they are all big five point (5x5) or small six point (6x6) bulls.
Pronghorn and deer tags are issued only through the draw and the system is similar to that for elk.
Colorado issues very few licenses for moose, rocky mountain bighorn sheep, mountain goats and desert bighorns. You have to apply for three years just to get into the draw and start collecting points. One should consider any license for any of those species as a once-in-a-lifetime tag although if you were to start applying for and gathering points when young it's conceivable that you could hunt those species two or three times in a lifetime.
Internet is the easiest way to apply. Here's the home page for CO Parks & Wildlife.
http://cpw.state.co.us/There are so many options that there is no easy answer for just how and what you should apply for. There is a lot of info on the CO P&W web site and you need to spend mucho, mucho hours studying all that's available. Concentrate on big game statistics.
http://cpw.state.co.us/thingstodo/Pages/Statistics.aspxWhen you're ready to apply, start here.
http://cpw.state.co.us/BuyApply/pages/hunting.aspxIn Colorado there is no separate big game hunting license. Your elk tag is your hunting license. They will send your license/tag in the mail.
You must have completed a hunter education course if you were born after January 1, 1949. You also need to buy a $10 habitat stamp. If you don't draw any tag, everything but a small application fee is refunded.
KC