Originally Posted by buffybr

I didn't start hunting until I was in college in the mid 60s. My sophomore year I rented a house with 3 other students that were from Craig, Colorado. They had grew up on deer and elk meat, and invited me to go hunting with them for our winter's meat. Back then I think all of Colorado's deer and elk tags were OTC, so we just bought our tags and went hunting near their home town. The first year I shot a spike mule deer and the second year a 5x5 bull elk, and I became hooked on hunting.

Except for a 3 year interruption for my time in the Army and Vietnam, I kept that up until I moved to Montana in 1975. In the early 70's Colorado black bear tags were also OTC and one spring I bought a tag and got my first bear.

When I got to Montana, resident deer, elk, and bear tags (both black and grizzly) were OTC so I started buying them, and have kept my freezers full of deer and elk meat ever since. In 1978 I moved to my current location in southwest Montana and discovered that Montana had OTC tags for bighorn sheep in a number of units outside of Yellowstone Park, so for a dozen or so years I'd also buy one of them.

Most of my life I've chosen to live in deer and elk country, so all of my Colorado and Montana OTC hunting has been within a tank of gas from my home.

In 1980 a few of my friends had planned a DIY caribou hunt in Alaska, and invited me along. These were also OTC tags, and each of us got a caribou bull.

It wasn't until 1999 that I bought a OTC tag anywhere beside my home state of Montana. That year I heard about a Dall sheep hunt cancellation in the Mackenzie Mountains in Canada's Northwest Territories. It was my first guided hunt, and I was able to buy OTC tags for a Dall ram, Mountain caribou, Wolverine, and Wolf. The first afternoon in base camp we saw a wolf coming toward us, but an over-eager guide put himself between me and the wolf, and I couldn't get a shot. I did get nice trophies of the other animals that I had bought tags for.

The last year or two that I lived in Colorado and many years here in Montana, I've bought OTC Mountain lion tags, hoping to see a lion while I was hunting deer or elk. Over the years I have seen about a half dozen lions, but never while I could hunt them. So in 2015 I saw a good deal with an outfitter in western Colorado for a Mountain lion, and in December of that year I went on a hunt with him and got a nice tom on the first day.

Canada has been good to me with some other OTC tags:

In 2004 I booked a fall hunt for Central Canadian Barren Ground caribou and Musk ox in northern Northwest Territories, and I was able to get two great caribou bulls and a super bull Musk ox. These were all OTC tags.

Then in January of 2017 I was at the International Sportsman's Expo in Denver. I had wanted to hunt caribou in Quebec for many years, and while I was visiting with the representative from Leaf River Outfitters, he said he still had a couple of caribou tags, and that 2017 would be the last year for non-resident caribou hunting in Quebec. I ended up getting one of the highest B&C scoring Quebec-Labrador caribou bulls in the last 3 years.

And this past January I was again at the ISE show in Denver, and talked an outfitter from Newfoundland who had OTC tags for both caribou and moose. I will be hunting with him in September.

I guess technically, the tags for the exotic species in Texas, and tags in many other foreign countries are also OTC. Many of these hunts can be done in other times of the year than our North American fall hunting seasons. I won't go into the details, but I did do a January Exotic hunt in 2010 in Texas, a March hunt in New Zealand in 2014, a number of hunts in the months of July, August, and September to the African countries of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique between 2000 and 2016, and a hunt in Azerbaijan in 2017. On most of those hunts, you either just buy the hunt from the outfitter or you pay the outfitter for the government tag(s) for the animal(s).