I'm planning on applying for an antelope tag next year. Are there any resources that you would suggest in doing the research for the hunt? Or does anyone have any experience to share?
There is a lot of Bureau of Land Management (BLM)in Wyoming, which is public, and a ton of antelope. Look on the Wyoming Game and Fish web site and you can also get maps that show public land and private land. The web site will show the drawing odds for tags in any given area and the folks in the office are very helpful if you call them. I would find an area that has a lot of public land that is connected so you have a large area to hunt. Some areas of the state are like a checker board where the red blocks are public and the black are private. They are one square mile each so its good to have an area with several square miles connected. If you have a Garmin GPS,you can buy a small chip that will show all public and private land and the game and fish sells those too. I have one and they are really awesome to have when hunting in Wyoming. Let me know if you have more questions. I think you have to apply for tags in February. Good luck.
Having a gps like mentioned earlier can be an absolute game changer when hunting public land. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - now Free
Thanks Carp. I don't listen to the critics anyway. :D About 3 years ago, when those chips had just come out (for Wyoming at least), my son entered a piece of public land from a county road where the land only made contact with the road for about 50 yards. He saw it on his topo map and when the chip confirmed it he went in on foot and killed a nice mule deer. He needed help getting the deer out so he went back to the truck so he could get where he had a cell signal to call a buddy for help. When he got back to the truck, the game warden was there because the rancher that owned the land next to the public land had called him in as a trespasser. It seems nobody hunted that land because they assumed there was no public access. My son showed the warden his access point on the topo and on the GPS with the new chip. The game warden was pretty impressed but then asked him if he had stayed on public land the entire time he was hunting so he then showed him his tracks on the GPS where he had walked the entire time. They had a nice chat and the game warden told my son he would educate the rancher. My son gave him a Bowhunt or Die dvd and they became friends. The next hunting season the Wyoming Game and Fish had those chips for sale on their web site. Pretty cool. The new chips even show what deer, elk, antelope area you are in when you hit the "zoom" button!
I'm somewhat tecnologically challenged when it comes to some of this stuff. The girlfriend just whipped out her garmin e-trex venture. Not a super fancy one from what I can tell, but does anyone know if there are available topo maps such as the ones discussed above for this model. Here is one I found, not sure if it will work with this model or if this is comparable to what you guys are referring to. Any help would be great!
I can't remember off the top of my head if the venture will take the card. It must have a color screen and it must have a card slot. The company that produces the chip is based out of Missoula, MT where I live. I custom built 30 new hunting themed waypoint icons for them that have been added to all of the new chips. If you have bought or did an update since 9/13 you will have them. Pretty cool way to dress up your map. The Garmin hunting icons were dismal.
Had the same thing happen last year. Just make sure that any road you use has a sign on it. I had road on GPS chip and on hunting map. We had killed 3 antelope the first morning on BLM. Apparently we used the ranchers road which wasn't public. (Yet it was on the map provided by state of Wyoming and also on GPS for wyoming chip) Rancher tried to get us to pay trespass fee for hunting. He said pay or he would call the game warden. I told him to call the game warden. Ranchers wife starting dragging my antelope to their truck. She did leave it. She was a complete mess of a person. Swearing and yelling at us. Game warden eventually showed up and told us that we trespassed across their ranch to get to the BLM land. Rancher could have pressed charges for trespassing, but didn't. Game warden told us it was weird that he didn't press charges as he has in the past. I had shown them two forms of identifying the road. We had to break up camp that night and leave, but no fines. I really think the rancher could easily put up a private road sign and prevent this from happening as it seemed to have happened in the past. We had no intent of trespassing as I'm not a fan of people trespassing. Moral of the story. Make sure you see signs for roads or they may be private....even if on map or GPS. Look and be aware of land locked areas as mentioned in earlier posts. We hunted unit 23 in Wyoming which was easy to get tags for. A lot of the big primary BLM land wasn't much good for antelope. Plenty of ground that was, but you have to search and see before hunting. I would recommend getting out a day or two early to scout wherever you go.
Thank you for the information. I don't think that WY is in the near future for me. I'm looking to take down a nice NV antelope. I will definitely look into the GPS chips down here
