Hunting Washington Forum

Big ole swollen neck!  I saw more of this than usual myself where there were bucks hanging out together.  Maybe one of them was identifying as a doe?

Mule deer are fascinating! Look at the size of that bucks body 🤯 great photo Bone!!

Quote from: 3nails on Yesterday at 02:56:14 PM

Myself and about 30 other people where I work would shut down the offices for a few minutes and get 10 computers per person going 

Wow, what a joke for everyone else who wasn't gaming the system. Maybe the 'normal Joe' NRs will get a fair shot at a tag for once.  I know of locals who piled on the NR tags here every year for out-of-state friends as well, time to play fair.

This was basiscally the good and bad of the old system.  If you wanted it hard enough you could drive/fly to Idaho, find a license vendor (better if it was someone obscure like a fishing shop) and then buy your tag in person, or have a friend buy one for you and 10 other people at once in the same way.  The people who weren't doing that had 4 browsers open on 4 computers, and then took the highest number in the queue.  Anyone who was just logging in on one device and hoping for the best hardly had a prayer.  Our group always got tags... (I'm local, but my friends).  It was BS, now its more fair, but now it costs a lot more to try also.  I think we may be surprised this year to see some units not sell out in the first pass.  If everyone puts the most popular ones down, and nobody puts some "bad backup options" then we may see remaining tags on those.  For people far out of state, they might not even know what the less desiriable units are.  That'll change after this first pass when everyone gets to see draw data.

As someone mentioned on here, we think there's this mass of extra people who wanted tags but didn't get them.  Keep in mind there are 28,000 deer and elk tags combined (sure some are outfitter, etc), but there's a LOT of NR tags that everyone is going for at the same time.  That queue would get up in the 40-60k realm, but for a large contingency, our group included, we might have had 50 slots for 5 guys.  It could have been that there were only 10k unique people in the online queue and then maybe 1k in person?  All we really know is at the end most of the tags went to someone who was willing to pay for a chance in perhaps their last choice (or previously not-considered unit).  I just have to wonder how many people thought "{random idaho zone with no elk}, what the heck, why not?" when they finally got in, who now might not put it in their 5 choice list at all. 

Anyway, good luck to everyone.  Hope this is a more streamlined approach and most folks get a tag they want.

East Wenatchee Valley Tractor has always been good to work with.  I have purchased a few items from them and always thought they were fair.  Never had anything repaired there, but I imagine they do a good job. 

I’ve been hunting there as a non-resident for nearly 40 years. We have seen stretches of lean and bounty. The east side spots we frequent have been drier than normal lately and deer numbers are down from a few years ago but not as bad as the years around 2012 or the late 1990’s.

Funny, 2013 was a killer year for us in region 7. Took my best MT buck that year and saw tons of deer. Fast forward to today and we are seeing a fraction of the deer in our areas even though the population estimates are almost identical.