As much as I don't like fees being a consideration that keeps people from hunting, it is a reality. A couple things that I reconciled 30 years ago when I decided I wanted to hunt as much as possible and hunt as many places as possible (though my budget would not allow for at that time).
I was living in Nevada where everything was on a draw. At the time they issued a handful of elk tags and a couple hundred antelope tags. I had to draw a deer tag if I was going to hunt. I didn't like the reality, so I had two practical options, one semi-practical option, and one impractical option. Since quitting hunting is never an option for me, that is not part of the consideration I mention.
The impractical option was to wait for other states to lower the prices so I could afford to travel there and hunt every year. That wasn't going to happen in 1989 anymore than it is likely to happen in 2020.
The two practical options were 1) stay in Nevada and deal with the existing situation, or 2) allocate more of my monthly budget to hunting in other states and accept the reality that with a newborn and college loans the small amount remaining to allocate to the hunting budget wouldn't correspond with how much I wanted to hunt.
The semi-practical option was to leave Nevada, take 40% pay cuts, and know it would be even harder to find spare money to allocate to out of state hunting. This is the option we chose. When I look at what I left on the table in terms of employment opportunity/rewards for me and my wife, our first Montana resident elk tag cost us about $25,000. And every tag since then has gotten even more expensive as our financial paths here are far lower growth than what we walked away from.
The reason I say that was semi-practical is because it takes a special spouse and a serious love of hunting to make that kind of financial sacrifice for the benefit of being able to buy an OTC deer and elk tag every year. Most people, once settled into a career and lifestyle, just aren't going to do what I did.
Hopefully it gives some context to why a lot of residents of western states feel complaints about high non-resident fees is a bit incomplete. When I say "incomplete," it is under that a complete assessment would include what these residents might have walked away from to move to a good hunting state or the many opportunity costs they've incurred by declining much high paying jobs in locales without the same hunting benefit.
I wish fees were not an issue. But, they are.
When it comes to a resident v. non-resident comparison, I would argue that a full accounting of the economic sacrifice, which includes both true costs of cash out of hand and financial opportunity costs, that residents of many of these western states are paying far more for their resident benefits than many non-resident pay in cash.
Even when I took the big financial hit to move to Montana, I still made it a priority to build a budget for non-resident applications. It took about five years to build enough savings to start the process in just one state. I wonder if people today would be willing to save $4 per week into a savings account, for five years, to accomplish one of their goals. That is what I did. And in doing so, my wife and I made a lot of sacrifices of other things to build my slush fund that allowed me to accomplish this goal of applying in most all western states.
Point of that personal example is that today is no different than it was 30 years ago. It was expensive then, relative to what I could afford; just as it is today. It took some budgeting and decisions of what I place in highest priority to accomplish what I wanted. It took a lot of compromise with my wife so we both felt we were being fair in the allocations of time and money to our individual activities/goals.
I am sure this does nothing to ease the frustration some have. I assessed my life and realized the frustrations were not going away unless I did something about it. Lots of folks have done the same thing, likely to an even higher financial hit than my example. Hunters who moved to Alaska for better hunting and get away from the outfitter requirements have probably made bigger sacrifices (cost of living and employment opportunities) than what I used in my personal example. They realized that sideboards are what they are and they made a decision accordingly. I don't begrudge them a single bit and I understand why they would want the rules to be what they are in Alaska (or whatever state they moved to).
I hope everyone gets to a point where their budgets, priorities, and life situation allows them to apply in every state. As someone who has been doing this for twenty-five years, my advice would be to do it with your eyes wide open. What you are buying into today is going to change. The draw system might change for the better or the worse, but it will change in most states prior to getting the tag you dream of. And lastly, I always remind myself that every state I apply to as a non-resident is a hunting opportunity that state does not have to provide. Every non-resident tag I might have a chance at is a tag that has been provided to me as a non-resident, at the courtesy of the residents.
www.gohunt.com
