Golden era of northwest Wyoming elk hunting slides toward expected but undesirable end

Droves of Wyoming residents will click over to Game and Fish’s website on June 19 to review their draw results for elk hunting tags. Thousands will be looking to see if they’ll have a shot at a cow or calf in the vast complex of mostly public land stretching across the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. 

The opportunities there are great, and have been for a long time. The long-studied Jackson Elk Herd, although experiencing a stretch of relative scarcity, has been one of the largest elk herds in the American West for generations — a population held in check by targeting the females.

On the south end of Jackson Hole, the Fall Creek Herd has similarly thrived. This year, Wyoming’s offering 750 limited-quota tags that will give hunters a chance to put a cow or calf in the freezer in the two hunt areas, split by the Snake River, where the herd dwells.

The abundance continues farther south and east in the Afton, Piney, Pinedale and Upper Green River herds. Many hundreds more Wyoming residents will hand over $43 to vie for a chance at bagging a cow or calf elk during late-season hunts, when animals are down at lower elevations and easier to kill. 

It’s no secret that wapiti are thriving statewide. They’re doing so well, especially in places with lots of private land, it’s even problematic. Wildlife managers are going to great lengths to kill more female elk — the reproducers that drive the size of any ungulate herd.

But such abundance isn’t expected to last for six northwestern Wyoming herds. By around a decade from now, cow elk hunting might no longer be necessary, and, in fact, prohibited. Instead, a new force of nature would fill the herd-shrinking role that human hunters now play. 

That factor is chronic wasting disease. It’s an incurable, transmissible neurological condition that shrinks the lifespan of its wapiti hosts from 15 or so years down to just a few. Spread by always-lethal prions that can live in the environment for decades, it’s not always devastating for elk. Herds, even overpopulated ones like those in the Laramie Mountains, have lived with CWD at lower prevalence rates for decades. 

But there’s a differentiating factor for the six herds where experts expect that cow hunting could soon end. For months at a time during the winter, thousands of these animals are parked on feedgrounds, eating hay and alfalfa in small spaces where scientists have learned that feeding drives up contact rates between animals and accelerates the spread of diseases. Chronic wasting disease is just now reaching the region, and the response so far, guided by a management plan, is to maintain the status quo. 

Many northwestern Wyoming elk hunters appear to be greeting the looming calamity with a shrug, said Hank Edwards, a retired wildlife health laboratory supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

“I have tried in so many of my presentations to get the message across that this is dire,” Edwards told WyoFile. “Yet, people just don’t get it. They say, ‘F*** it, I’ll get to hunt another 10 years, then I’ll be too old to hunt. Who cares?’” 

Hunter receptions

With the worst effects of CWD on feedground elk still years away, concerns among rank-and-file hunters are out there. But it hasn’t yet been cause for alarm. When the Game and Fish Commission solicited comments in response to its proposed elk hunting seasons for 2025, the public submitted several hundred remarks. But only a few comment writers encouraged precautionary steps to avert the likely worst outcomes of a disease that experts expect will decimate six elk herds within a decade, or two at most.

“I recommend lowering the objective. We need to kill some elk,” former Game and Fish Commissioner Mark Anselmi wrote about hunting seasons in Jackson Hole. “CWD has raised its head and [at] some point in [the] future, I would guess the refuge will quit feeding. Knock the population down by harvest while you can.” 

Green River resident Bill Ames made a similar request. He called for reducing densities of feedground-dependent, overpopulated elk along the Wyoming Range’s Piney Front.

“I would like to see herd objectives reviewed with possible CWD impacts and reducing feedground dependency,” wrote Ames, who also asked for a late-season hunt on the footprint of a 33-acre feedground in the Bondurant area where an epidemic is incubating. “What can we do to put elk of the Dell Creek feedground in people’s freezers and avoid the slaughter of a high prevalence of CWD?” 

A Pinedale resident also sent in an unconventional idea to address feedground elk. Otherwise, there was little encouragement to tackle a disease threat that could upend Northwest Wyoming elk hunting as it is known today. 

Pavillion outfitter B.J. Hill, who runs hunts in the Jackson Hole area, denies that there’s a problem. 

“The CWD narrative is being driven by some of the Jackson managers and staff as well the [National Elk Refuge] employees,” Hill wrote in his comment letter. “It’s basically in-house activism unchecked.” 

Outfitters like Hill have largely voiced support for keeping elk feeding going, regardless of CWD. He’s insisted in the past that expert projections are wrong. Other outfitters have said they’re open to closing feedgrounds, so long as state wildlife managers don’t lower their targeted herd sizes.

Lee Livingston, a past president of the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association, said he doesn’t see any easy answers to state and federal wildlife managers’ predicament. The feedground system is over a century old. It has separated elk herds from domestic cattle, propped up populations, insulated herds from the effects of bad winters and allowed them to cope with the loss of habitat from private land development.

“Unless you just did a wholesale slaughter of elk, I don’t see how you could shut down feedgrounds,” Livingston said at last week’s Wyoming Sportsperson Conservation Forum in Dubois. “If you’re going to shut down feedgrounds, then you need to come up with an alternative.” 

There have been small-scale efforts to do just that, like paying ranchers to host elk. 

Another alternative that’s being assessed is having fewer elk on the landscape in order to forgo feeding. Right-sizing herds to fit the natural winter range that’s available isn’t a popular idea — outfitters have signaled they’ll oppose it — but it’s the path that wildlife officials who understand disease dynamics predict will lead to the best outcomes for populations and elk hunting. 

Path of most destruction

Wildlife disease experts have gamed out what they expect is about to take place in the Jackson Elk Herd and other five feedground-region herds. The scientific inquiries were published by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2023 and 2024 in anticipation of changes to elk feeding sites on federal land. 

Elk populations and hunting opportunities decline under all scenarios analyzed, including the end of all cow hunting. The reason for the latter, USGS disease ecologist Paul Cross explained, is that the analysis assumed Wyoming would maintain its current elk herd size objectives, but that, by around year 10, the actual populations would tumble more than 20% below the goal. When that happens, wildlife managers’ standard response is to scale back or end cow hunting to allow the herds to grow.

While declines are expected regardless of management choices, the keep-feeding option shakes out the worst. 

“Our predictions are a 55% reduction in population size across the five herd units, excluding Jackson,” Cross told WyoFile. 

Within 20 years, CWD prevalence in those still-fed herds is expected to reach 42%, he said. 

Those animals, for many hunters, will be headed for the trash instead of the freezer. There’s never been evidence of CWD crossing over to humans. But studies suggest there’s not an absolute barrier, and Game and Fish promotes Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization guidance to not consume CWD-positive animals.

Expected rates of CWD among feedground elk are four times greater than the highest rates detected in Wyoming elk today. The Iron Mountain Herd, with just 10% prevalence, currently tops the charts in elk, according to the state’s latest assessment. 

Filmmaker Shane Moore, an avid elk hunter who grew up on a ranch in the Gros Ventre Range, understands the skepticism about the expert projections. 

“They are really admittedly nothing more than guesses,” said Moore, who sat on the working group that shaped Wyoming’s CWD plan. “But they’re guesses from very bright people — the most knowledgeable people.” 

The eight wildlife disease experts who contributed to the USGS study include: Emily Almberg, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks; Justin Binfet, Wyoming Game and Fish Department; Hank Edwards, Wyoming Game and Fish (now retired); Nathan Galloway, National Park Service; Glen Sargeant, U.S. Geological Survey; Brant Schumaker, University of Wyoming; Daniel Walsh, U.S. Geological Survey; and Ben Wise, Wyoming Game and Fish.

Moore is one of the few hunters who has vocally advocated for Wyoming to heed the scientific predictions. 

“Right now, we have only bad choices,” Moore said. “When you’re faced with two bad choices, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the best of the bad choices. We haven’t, in my opinion.”

Political realities constrain Wyoming Game and Fish from making any sharp turns on elk feeding. The Wyoming Legislature passed a law in 2021 requiring feedground closures be vetted by the Wyoming Livestock Board and leaving the decisionmaking authority to the governor. And the agency’s feedground plan relies on developing tertiary herd-specific plans that require building consensus with pro-feeding parties. 

Moore laments that an issue that could jeopardize elk hunting’s future has become so politicized. 

“I think the sad reality is we’re not listening to the biologists in the community,” he said, “we’re listening to the politicians.” 

‘Real life test case’

Meanwhile, CWD is spreading steadily into the feedground region. Dead elk that tested positive were found last winter at four of the 21 sites, and there’s no knowing how many additional live infected elk were shedding the prions that spread the disease. 

“This is going to be a real life test case of model predictions and CWD dynamics in elk feedgrounds,” said Game and Fish’s Binfet — one of the experts who contributed to the USGS’ modeling. 

There’s no knowing what’s about to happen, he said. 

“CWD may not be the demise of elk in the GYE, as some folks fear,” Binfet said. “The other thing that would not surprise me is if feedgrounds contribute to a situation whereby we see CWD prevalence in elk skyrocket.” 

Game and Fish retiree Edwards, the wildlife health laboratory supervisor who also contributed to the projections, is pessimistic. Over his decades on the job, he consistently saw how the feedgrounds spread disease. During one bad winter in the early 2000s, he said, brucellosis rates at the Alpine feedground spiked from 30% to 80% in one year. 

You could easily make the case, Edwards said, that CWD is going to be spread more effectively than brucellosis, which doesn’t flare up until fetuses are aborted in the spring. 

“As the snow melts, all those feces that have been buried and trampled become available,” he said. “The likelihood of transmission is going to increase.”

Edwards worries that elk hunters don’t grasp what’s about to hit them. 

“It may take a big increase in prevalence at Dell Creek or whatever feedground before the public really starts to take notice,” Edwards said. “Unfortunately by then, it’s going to be too late.” 

By too late, he means CWD will have already started the process of destroying the herds. The eye-opening changes it can inflict upon an ungulate population will likely be “permanent,” he said.  

“From all that we know about prion diseases,” Edwards said, “the populations are not going to recover.”