There are two camps to this both end up in the same place.
1. You build yourself a multi-year plan on hunting the USA, and build points and eventually draw.
2. You pay for private land owner tags and probably guided hunts. Through an outfitter you find, or contact one of our many booking agents like WTA adventures.
For the first one:
You must invest in research, and have time to commit to research, or pay someone like hunting fool or WTA Adventures to manage the profile and do research with you.
If you are going to do the research yourself,
www.gohunt.com is about $150 USD a year, it will give you more of a crash course on the non-resident USA hunting game with the most speed.
There are others like Hunting Fool and a few more, I am not familiar with on the research end.
You will also need a mapping technology website that will show your landowner status. Onxmaps is what I use.
First thing is first, and I don't mean this to be an asshole. Forget about wild sheep, mountain goats, moose, and things like that. The draw odds are often .05 percentage points for non-resident hunts with no points, or low points. In Alaska you must be guided for these tags, and most of them are OTC. You can include a couple of these applications in our strategy, but don't buy $100 points or $250 points as you are so far behind in point creep as this isn't really an option. I am the same, it's just what it is. If you have the cash, then a few sheep, moose and goat applications could be included. Generally there somewhere between 1 and 30 nonresident tags across entire states for those species.
Elk, mule deer, blacktail deer, Coues whitetails and Western whitetails, pronghorns, and black bear and aoudad. That is where the bread and butter is.
You can hunt wild turkeys and Blackbears in most western states on public land (but not all) over the counter. You can hunt aoudad in New Mexico OTC, there are draw areas as well. But they are available over the counter.
There are archery tags OTC for deer, elk and antelope in a lot of western states.
Rifle tags are 99.9% draw for non-residents for most things.
Build a 10 year plan.
Start applying for points in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Arizona every year. Apply in New Mexico and Idaho every year you can hunt. Idaho and New Mexico do not have points programs, so you don't need to apply there if you aren't planning on coming to the USA that year.
Then you have the alternate states I would not apply in unless I had a big budget. These are the Dakotas, Nevada, Utah, Oregon and Washington. If you are able/willing to finance guided hunts in Alaska, then you would work with that outfitter to get those hunts.
Years 1-3
Plan tags that don't commit tag-fratricide based on season dates, that you can foreseeablly draw within 1-3 years. there will be some public land deer, elk and antelope hunts in areas that you will have to work hard to figure out the property boundaries.
Years 3-5
These are tags that will take 2-4 points to draw, and will be better hunts.
Years 5-20
These will be tags that will take a lot of points to draw.
Go for the gold.
Based on budget, if you can I'd include one or two applications for better antelope, deer, elk, sheep, goat, whatever you like tag every year that the hunting season works out for your travel on.
Build unit experience by hunting turkeys, blackbear, coyotes, in those units as much as you can. Then when you finally draw you have an idea.
Randy Newberg, GoHunt, Hunting Fool and quite a few other companies have videos on you tube explaining how the draws work.
For instance:
Wyoming has preference points, only the top point holders can draw point holder tags in that application cycle. They also have a non-preference point draw. These two draws are separated into a high and lower cost price pools. Special and General. With 40% of the tags going to the special higher price tags. So Wyoming has 4 draws going on at the same time. You must apply for one of the two draw types. There is very little chance of drawing a 2nd choice in Wyoming. So you can add a 2nd choice if you want, but the odds of getting a tag as a 2nd choice is slim to zero.
Because non-residents generally can't draw there 2nd choice you have 2 choices to make Special or Regular. You do not actually apply for the preference point or non-preference point pool. You have to have enough points to qualify. If you do not draw a tag in the preference point pool, you will go into the non-preference points pool.
Deer. Special $1215
Deer Regular $389
Elk Special $1965
Elk Regular $707
Antelope Special $1215
Antelope Regular $341
Wyoming also has the wilderness area issue. You can't hunt Wyoming wilderness areas without a registered Wyoming guide.
Arizona, New Mexico and other states use all or most of your hunt choices before moving onto the next applicant. I have drawn my 3rd or 4th choice elk in New Mexico, and it was a Gila bull tag.
and make sure you take a couple of printed copies with you to deal with USA Customs on arrival. Usually with your passport they quickly pull up your permit in their system but a couple of time they couldn't and actually checked my printed permit.
