State coverage

Twelve states are live. The base map layer set is the same everywhere — PAD-US public lands, parcels with owner names, computed landlocked public land, hunt-unit boundaries, slope and aspect, hillshade and 3D terrain, burns, timber cuts, water, trails and MVUM motorized routes.

What differs is the draw and harvest data, and it differs because the agencies differ. A state with one row in a column below is usually a state where the agency publishes one thing, not a state we have not finished. Where the gap is ours we say so.

At a glance

Where the data stops, and why

Colorado

The deepest draw data of the western states and the only one with second-choice odds — CPW's recap publishes a per-choice table, so the strategy planner can tell you when a point-code first choice plus a real second choice beats applying straight. Trails come from the state's own COTREX layer rather than OpenStreetMap.

Wyoming

Units are the elk hunt-area layer. Deer and antelope areas reuse the same numbers over different polygons, so per-unit harvest is elk only: attaching deer harvest to elk-area geometry would put real numbers on the wrong ground. Access Yes is carried as two layers because the rules differ — Walk-In Areas need no contact, Hunter Management Areas need a free permission slip first.

Montana

Six draw species, the widest of the original states. Block Management is the walk-in layer; Wildlife Management Areas are state-owned and already inside PAD-US, so they are shown separately rather than counted twice as access acreage.

Arizona

The draw-odds table publishes one aggregate applicant count per hunt, which cannot express a bonus-point system. The per-hunt curve comes from AZGFD's separate Bonus Point Report, which begins in 2023 — so the point history is three seasons inside an eight-season demand history, and the draw pages say so rather than trending a flat number. No earlier report is published.

California

CDFW splits one species-season across a family of PDFs — by hunt type, then again by point value once the table outgrew the page. Thirteen documents make up a single deer season. Statewide parcels are not redistributable under CDFW's terms, so the countywide fabric is excluded from published tiles; the open county slices (Mendocino, Humboldt, Los Angeles) are carried instead.

Pennsylvania

A general-license state: elk is the only limited-entry hunt, published as a single pooled entry, so there is no per-unit odds series to trend and nothing to backtest. That is the whole PA draw, not a partial ingest. In exchange PA has the longest harvest record we carry — PGC publishes deer, bear and turkey by WMU back to 2009.

Walk-in shows State Game Lands, not the Hunter Access Program: that program's layer forbids reuse without written permission and its legacy twin exposes landowner details, so it is absent because it is unlicensed, not because it is empty.

Utah

The widest coverage in the product — nine draw species and seven with per-unit harvest, including the three once-in-a-lifetime species no other state we carry publishes per unit.

One caveat worth knowing when reading unit numbers: UDWR's layer contains every boundary a hunter can apply to, including nested and per-species ones that cover the same ground. The 152 units therefore overlap, and their acres sum to roughly three times the state. Per-unit figures are correct; totals across units are not, which is why we never show one.

Idaho

The only state here with no point system at all. A controlled hunt is a pure random draw — every applicant equal, every year independent, nothing accrued by applying and nothing lost by sitting out. Applying for a decade leaves you exactly where a first-time applicant stands, which is the single thing every points-based mental model gets wrong about Idaho. So there is no point creep to chart and nothing to backtest; what the charts show instead is twelve seasons of demand, the deepest series we carry.

In exchange Idaho publishes two things almost nobody else does. Applicants and permits arrive split by residency, which matters because nonresidents are capped at 10% of each hunt's tags and at a single tag in hunts with ten or fewer — resident and nonresident odds are computed against different quotas out of different pools, and are often an order of magnitude apart. And it publishes second choice, which until Idaho only Colorado did.

Money is the other asymmetry worth knowing. Moose, bighorn sheep and mountain goat are once-in-a-lifetime, you may apply for only one of the three in a year, and the full tag fee is paid at application and refunded if you are not drawn — a nonresident sheep applicant has $2,857.50 out the door against roughly one-in-four-hundred odds, against $18 for an elk application.

Harvest is deer only. IDFG's general-season table is hard-coded to deer, and the tool serving the other species returns a server error to any correctly-formed request, so elk, pronghorn, moose, sheep and goat per-unit harvest are absent because the agency's endpoint is broken, not because we skipped them.

Nevada

The most public state we carry — 84.5% federal by area, against Idaho's 63.1% as the next highest, and a median unit that is 90.1% public. If the product is for public-land hunting, this is where it counts most.

Nevada squares its bonus points: a hunter with N points holds N² + 1 entries, so ten points is 101 chances against a first-timer's one. Squaring never becomes a queue, though — a zero-point applicant draws on luck every year and no number of points guarantees a tag, which is the difference between this and Wyoming's or Colorado's preference systems and the thing most Nevada explainers get wrong.

NDOW publishes applicants and successes at every point level across five choices, with residency in separate files — deeper than Colorado's two. Their per-hunt workbook is the richest single table any agency gives us: 21 columns carrying both draw and harvest, including hunter satisfaction and trophy-quality figures nobody else publishes.

Two limits worth stating. The point history is demand, not draw-out — a bonus lottery has no threshold to trend, so Nevada's charts behave like Montana's and Idaho's rather than Colorado's. And harvest is one season: NDOW publishes a separate workbook per year and only 2025 is ingested so far, where the draw goes back to 2022.

There is no walk-in program to carry, and that is the honest answer rather than a gap. NDOW's Wildlife Management Areas are state-owned and already inside PAD-US, so counting them as access acreage would double-count exactly as Montana's would. At ~85% federal, Nevada's access story is public land.

Parcels are boundary-only: the statewide fabric publishes no owner column, so identify shows a parcel and links to the county assessor, as Utah's does.

A note on comparing states

Unit statistics are computed identically everywhere, so they are meant to be compared. "Remote" means more than a mile from any road — OSM roads, MVUM roads and motorized trails together. Until August 2026 five states were computed against Forest Service roads alone, which made them look dramatically more remote than they are; that is fixed, and the median unit now runs 12–19% remote in the western states and near zero in Pennsylvania, which is what the road network actually looks like.

New Mexico

The only state that allocates by a hard quota. A minimum 84% of every hunt's licences go to New Mexico residents, 10% to residents or nonresidents who have contracted a registered outfitter, and 6% to nonresidents who have not. Everywhere else, residency odds fall out of who applied; here a nonresident competes for a fixed 6% no matter how many residents are in the pool. A hunt with 85 licences has five nonresident tags whether 130 nonresidents apply or 1,300.

The outfitter pool is a third residency class, not a nonresident subtype — the department's own wording is "residents or nonresidents who've contracted with an outfitter" — so OpenHunt carries three pools per hunt and never averages them.

No points of any kind. An unsuccessful application confers nothing on the next one; NMDGF says so outright. A hunter who has applied fifteen years running stands exactly where a first-timer stands, nothing is lost by skipping a season, and there is no reason to apply for a hunt you do not want in order to build toward one you do. As with Idaho and Pennsylvania, the draw charts show demand rather than point creep, because a lottery has no threshold to trend.

Harvest joins the draw by hunt code. The ELK-1-132 in the odds report is the ELK-1-132 in the harvest report, so a hunt ties to what it killed — something only Colorado and Arizona otherwise offer. Elk carries seven seasons on that basis and deer five; seasons whose report layout the reader does not yet handle are omitted whole rather than in part, because a half-read year would bias a unit's success rate.

Oryx, ibex and Barbary sheep are hunted nowhere else in the United States. All three are introduced populations — oryx on and around White Sands, ibex in the Florida Mountains — drawn under the same random rules as everything else, which makes them the purest lottery tickets in the product. Several oryx hunts sit on military land and carry their own eligibility.

Gaps: no fees registry yet, and no walk-in layer — New Mexico's Open Gate program publishes a property atlas as PDF rather than as spatial data, the same answer California's SHARE program gives.

Oregon

Two draw systems in one state. Deer, elk, pronghorn and spring bear run a 75/25 split — 75% of a hunt's tags to the first-choice applicants with the most preference points, the remaining 25% drawn at random among all first-choice applicants. A hunter with no points is never locked out; a quarter of every hunt is a lottery they are in. Bighorn sheep, Rocky Mountain goat and the premium hunts have no points at all and are drawn entirely at random.

Points reset to zero when you draw a first choice — whether or not you buy the tag. This is the thing most likely to catch out a hunter used to Colorado, where points spend down against a threshold. In Oregon a successful first-choice draw empties the account.

Points count for the first choice only. Oregon takes five hunt choices, and choices two through five are drawn without any point consideration whatever — a hunt listed second is entered on the same footing as a first-timer's.

The richest draw data OpenHunt carries. ODFW publishes applicants and licences drawn at every preference-point level, split by residency, for six seasons. Nevada publishes a per-point curve but pools the residencies; Idaho splits residency but gives one aggregate level. Oregon gives all three at once, so "you hold four points, here is your chance in this hunt" is an observation rather than a model.

Nonresident caps of 5% (deer, elk, bear), 3% (pronghorn) and 5–10% (sheep, goat) mean the two residencies draw from different quotas, which is why their odds are never averaged here.

Gaps: ODFW names its hunts in prose and publishes no hunt-to-unit table, so roughly half of hunts resolve to a unit — from the harvest summaries, the only crosswalk that exists. The 2026 season resolves less well because ODFW renumbered every hunt code that year. Harvest covers deer, elk and pronghorn.