5 Things Wyoming Towns Do During Elk Season

Once Wyoming’s general elk season opens, Nick Schmidt barely sees daylight.

He’s one of the last wild-game processors left around Wapiti, and Cowboy State Daily reports he logs six- and seven-day weeks once hunters start bringing elk through the door.

The whole town changes with him.

These are the things Wyoming towns do during elk season.

1. Highway Check Stations

Towns along the roads into elk country host a new checkpoint once the season opens.

The general elk season opens October 15 across much of the state.

That’s when Game and Fish crews put up roadside check stations on the highways running through these towns.

Every hunter has to stop.

Game wardens and biologists staff the stations.

It’s the law, whether a hunter has harvested an animal or not.

That’s according to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s (WGFD) Christina Schmidt, quoted in Sheridan Media’s coverage of the check stations.

They’re not just making small talk.

Wardens collect samples and data from harvested animals, including disease tests for chronic wasting disease and brucellosis.

Biologists use it to judge how the local herds are holding up.

2. Meat Locker Rush

Towns like Wapiti and Gillette lean on a shrinking handful of wild-game processors to turn a truck bed of elk into freezer meat.

Nick Schmidt runs one of the few left around Wapiti.

The elk start piling up on his dock almost as soon as trucks roll in from the hunt areas, Cowboy State Daily reports.

It doesn’t let up.

Wild Country Processing in Gillette sees the same crunch, and owner Peyton Koehler says elk make up much of what comes through the door some weeks.

A cow elk yields about 120 pounds of meat.

The shop charges a flat $350 to break an elk down.

Fewer processors take the work on every year, since it’s brutal, seasonal labor that’s hard to staff.

3. Wall-Tent Lodging Tax

Wyoming’s hunting towns collect a lodging tax on more than motel rooms during elk season.

The state’s 5% lodging tax, signed into law in 2020 and in effect since 2021, reaches tents, campers, and other temporary sleeping setups, per the Wyoming Department of Revenue’s definition.

That includes the wall tents and wilderness camps outfitters set up for clients.

Those camps exist because nonresident hunters need a licensed guide to hunt big game inside a federally designated wilderness area.

It surprises many first-time clients.

State lawmakers have publicly debated whether taxing a tent is fair, since guiding, not lodging, is an outfitter’s main business.

Guiding pays the bills.

4. Guides and Pack Strings

Outfitting towns put their guides and packers to work the same week, loading horses and gear for clients headed into the backcountry.

That legal requirement keeps a small army of guides, cooks, and wranglers on the payroll every fall.

A 2015 economic study, the most recent figures publicly available, found Wyoming’s outfitters and guides collected $45.4 million from hunters that year.

Big-game hunting statewide supported about 3,100 jobs that same year and contributed more than $303.5 million to Wyoming’s economy overall.

Much of that money came from out-of-state hunters.

Wapiti outfitter Lee Livingston, president of the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association, has put his elk-hunt clients’ total spending at around $9,000 apiece.

That figure covers licenses, tips, and local purchases combined.

That’s nine thousand dollars a hunt.

It adds up fast for a town this size.

Money, moving fast.

5. Multimillion-Dollar Season

Towns feel one of the year’s biggest economic boosts during elk season.

Hunting, shooting, and trapping is the single largest slice of Wyoming’s outdoor-recreation economy, worth $109 million a year.

That’s according to a 2024 report from the University of Wyoming’s WORTH Institute, its outdoor-recreation research center, and the state’s Office of Outdoor Recreation.

Skiing, fishing, and hiking all trail behind it in that same report, and hunting topped RVing, the next-biggest category, by about $19 million.

Grocery stores, gas stations, and diners in these towns see the bump too, even though nobody tracks their receipts the way the state tracks license sales.

Wyoming Game and Fish sold more than 72,000 elk licenses in 2015, the most recent year with public figures available, a count worth over $9.9 million in license revenue.

Numbers, all season long.

License sales are one of the department’s main funding sources, alongside federal excise taxes on hunting gear.

Wyoming's Elk Numbers

Wyoming has an estimated 109,000 elk across the state, according to the Game and Fish Department's most recent estimate.

That's one reason so many small towns sit inside or next to elk country in the first place.

Elk herds don't spread evenly.

Some hunt areas run well above the department's population goals, which is part of why wardens hand out extra licenses in certain zones some years.

Other pockets of the state stay tighter, with quotas capped to protect a smaller herd.

Either way, the opener pulls hunters toward wherever the elk are.

That's usually a town with a gas station, a motel, and not much else standing between the highway and the hunt area.

Nick Schmidt sees that math play out every night in his shop.

Whatever comes through his door started out there on that map, in one of the state's elk herds.

Some nights his cooler holds elk from hunt areas on opposite sides of the state, all funneled through the same small-town door.