Wyoming antelope
One of the biggest hurdles for nonresident (“NR”) pronghorn (aka “antelope”) buck hunters in Wyoming is finding a place to hunt. The place to start is the Wyoming Game and Fish (WG&F) website. Go to the Hunting in Wyoming section and look at the drawing odds for past seasons. You will find two separate draws, Random and Preference Point (“PP”), with the each draw further split into NR and NR Special. That makes four separate draws, and you can only enter one. Wyoming is divided into many different hunting units with some further split into type 1 (whole unit) and type 2 (private land within the unit). It can be confusing at first but it will make sense if you spend the time to do your homework. https://wgfd.wyo.gov/
Find units that are possible to draw with your points and look at the quota for the unit. Some units may have a quota exceeding one thousand (ex. #23), and others as low as three (ex. #60). Be aware that there has been quite a bit of "point creep" in recent years.
The PP draw is where most licenses are issued and it gives tags in order to the people with the most PPs. A Special tag costs approximately double the price of a normal license resulting in odds of drawing that are normally better. The Random draw as the name suggests is done at random for far less available licenses and a drawing for the better units is a very long shot. The easily drawn units typically have difficult public access to hunting land, and plenty of tags for the outfitters on the private land. Public land can get very crowded in some units. The harder to draw tags usually have much better access and far fewer hunters.
Most public land is managed by BLM but there are also state lands to hunt and some private land that is available as a Walk In area. Trespassing is taken very seriously so crossing private land to access public land is out unless there is a public road crossing. Up to six can apply together in a party application and the points of all of them are averaged. This is great for families and friends but beware of strangers that want to join your party application. Some guys with no points troll the hunting sites looking for others that have several points and offer to help them with their special knowledge if they apply together. With the availability of GPS landowner chips and apps for phones there are no secrets anymore, and there are no special tricks for pronghorns. It is almost all spot (from a truck) and stalk for a shot.
If you think you want to hunt Wyoming in the future your best bet is to start buying Preference Points now. You can buy one per year per species, and you will be glad you did
Last edited by Big Uncle; 01-03-2019 at 07:05 AM.