I already said I agreed with most of that but it’s very generic. You state an increase in elk harvest. I have been stating this over and over and over until I’m blue in the face we need far more Cow elk harvest. My other suggestions are increased predator control, winter range habitat enhancement projects but we have been doing those for decades. Your suggestions were likely for the Casper area, I don’t hunt there much but recently did hunt area 34 and was not impressed compared to what G/H were in the past. If you haven’t hunted G/H much you can’t have any knowledge of how bad those high mountain alpine basins are loaded with elk in September which once every basin held dozens of big bucks and elk were scarce. Now it’s the opposite, elk are plentiful and deer are scarce. During the deer hunt in September I now see hunters and elk in all those basins and very few deer, on the Winter ranges the quality of bucks has slipped tremendously from decades past. I propose we limit buck harvest somehow. One suggestion is to align area 135 with the rest of the areas and either start them all on the same date. Founder suggests and I agree the outfitters are hammering them with a 3 week long season, we should cut that back to 2 weeks. Finally I suggest some mechanism where we still allow General hunting but try and decrease the harvest by offering a 2 year license with only 1 tag attached. This might help decrease the harvest a bit. I personally think APR are not what we need in the Wyoming Range as most hunters aren’t taking the yearling bucks they are hugely knocking out the 2-3 year old bucks though and this is one reason our genetic quality is decreasing on the Wyoming Range, especially with inferior spike bucks doing the breeding. I don’t follow your APR suggestion and how it would be applied to areas G/H?
