Hunting closures on PCMS have been a roller coaster. I have (had) an archery deer permit for PCMS valid from 10/1/20 to 11/30 and from 12/12 to 12/31. My brother has (had) the same tag. We planned to hunt the week of thanksgiving during the rut. PCMS posted that it would be closed for hunting the entire month of October. No big deal. We planned to hunt during November. Then on October 26, with no prior notice, PCMS posted that it would be open from Oct 26 to Nov 9 but closed from Nov 10 to Dec 7. There goes the period we planned to hunt. Season was open already and on Oct 26 we find out that we have access for the first time, but would not be able to hunt during the time we both had blocked out at the end of November. We got ahold of CPW and they allowed us to return or licenses for both points restoration and a full refund. All good! Nope. As my license return was being delivered to CPW PCMS posts that on second thought they will open access from November 21 to 29 and we could have gone hunting after all. Too late. Licenses already turned in. If it were not for preference points we would have just held onto our tags and risked being able to hunt at least a little whenever there was access. Another reason to hate preference and bonus points.
CPW has indicated that it will not be reissuing PCMS permits that have been returned. Do they not understand that loss of preference points motivates people to return tags when things might go sideways more than loss of the license money? I would gladly buy a leftover/returned tag that doesn’t risk my accumulated pref points. I had many more points than required to draw this permit and didn’t want to vaporize them under such uncertain access conditions so I sent the tag back.
