Compare Colorado elk and deer units, side by side
Pick two or three Game Management Units and a season. The table sets the state's own figures next to each other: how many people hunted each unit, how many filled a tag, and how crowded it was.
The table appears here once the unit list has loaded.
What each line means
- Hunters and harvest: the state's estimate of how many people hunted the unit in that season in 2024, and how many animals they took. The line under harvest splits it into males, females and young.
- Success: harvest divided by hunters, for 2024 and for 2023. Two years are not a trend. They do show how much one unit swings from one fall to the next.
- Hunters per 100 square miles: hunters divided by the size of the whole unit. It is the nearest thing the state's figures give to crowding.
- Days per hunter: the average number of days each hunter spent in the field.
- National forest and BLM land: the share of the unit that is federal land generally open to hunting. A busy unit with little public land is more crowded than its number says.
These figures cover the whole unit, private land included. On public land, crowding is higher and success is usually lower than the unit number. A unit with fewer than 100 hunters swings a lot from year to year: read it as rough.
This page puts units next to each other and stops there. It does not say which one to hunt: that depends on the license you can get, how far you will walk and where you drive from. Each unit's own page has its 2026 license rules, hunt codes, boundary and every season's figures.
All elk units All deer units Legal shooting hours
Chosen a unit and hold the tag?
Numbers tell you how busy a unit is. They do not tell you where to park, camp and sit. A FilledTag plan gives the truck spot, camp, and morning and evening seats, every pin checked against land records. The check is free.
Check your hunt, freeWhere these numbers come from
Colorado Parks and Wildlife surveys license holders after each season and publishes estimates of hunters, harvest and days hunted for every unit. This page uses the 2024 elk and deer harvest estimates and the 2023 reports in the same series, the same figures as the unit pages on this site. They are estimates from a survey, not counts. Land shares are measured from the BLM surface management map and are rounded.