In today’s day and age the answer to most questions is at your finger tips, if google can’t figure it out it’s probably not the search engine that’s the problem. In the past I had put together charter fishing trips to Lake Ontario for the late summer salmon run and had done all the research on where to go, when to go, and who to go with. If you’re ever in the mood for some good affordable salmon fishing check out Capt. Greg at Pleasure Unit Charters for some awesome fishing. While hunting out west would be a more challenging research task, I had the basic building blocks of what I’d need. When planning trips like this, it’s hard to please everyone so it’s good to have your best case scenario, with a of couple back up plans.

I began with Wyoming since I knew we wanted to do an Antelope hunt so I set out to understand how the tag system works. If you’re not familiar with the preference point/random draw system in WY you can go to their website here and they go into great detail about it. I navigated over to their hunt planner link and started to look at hunting zones for antelope. They have well over 100 hunting zones spread throughout the state for Antelope. I downloaded the Antelope hunting seasons PDF which breaks down each zone, by tag type, kill quota, hunt date, and any limitations. I took a look at my work schedule and knew for a rifle hunt we’d have to hunt the first or second week in October for most zones. I work a rotating shift so some weeks are better than others to take off to hunt. The other guys, thankfully aren’t in this type of situation so they were using a weeks vacation either way. I printed the PDF out and highlighted every unit that worked with my schedule. Then I had to print off the non-resident preference point drawing odds report. I cross referenced the zones I had previously highlighted with the drawing odds report. This left us predominately with the north east corner of the state, east of the Big Horn Mountains.

This was all fairy simple, yet time consuming. So to make things a little more complicated, I had our antelope zones narrowed down to about a dozen at the time. All these areas were what the state designates as limited access areas. Their’s public land there, it’s just not near as much as some of the other areas in the state. It also may be difficult to get to, or land locked by private land all together. So to complicate things a little more, I decided to check out the hunt planner page for Deer and see what the season dates were. Wyoming gives their non resident deer hunters regions to hunt in rather than the smaller zones. So you look at the hunt map and the non resident region is a cluster of smaller hunt zones. You still have to abide by the individual hunt zones hunting season dates and restrictions, but it gives you a little more freedom on where you want to hunt. So I cross referenced the hunt regions with the areas we were thinking about hunting and the dates lined up. So now we were talking about the possibility of a two species hunt. I then had to go to the Deer drawing odds and report to find out what our chances were to get a deer tag. The regular non resident preference point draw had a 55% chance of drawing a tag in region Y. This was the heart of the area I had been looking at to hunt antelope in as well.

Wyoming has what they call a “special draw” tag. The easiest way to put it, as I have to to understand it. The allotted non resident tags get broken into three parts, the regular preference point draw, the special preference point draw, and the random draw. 3/4 of the tags allotted to non-residents automatically go to the regular and special draw. The remaining 25% go to the random draw. Out of the original 75% that was allotted to the regular and special draw, they get split in half to the special and regular draw. The special draw is a more expensive tag. That is the only difference between these two tags. The idea is the state can make a little extra money, and if the odds are better in the special draw and you’re willing to pay more for your tag that you can enter that draw. Sometimes the odds are no better in the special draw than in the regular draw. It just so happened that in region Y in the 2015 hunting season there was a 100% success rate on drawing a deer tag with 0 preference points. Now things can change from year to year, but I was betting that wasn’t going to change drastically from one year to the next. So after weeks of researching, I had settled on an area 16 Antelope hunt and a region Y Mule deer hunt during the first week of October. The easy part was over now it was time to convince the guys and deal with logistics.