Eight Utah Elk Units Never Left the Top 10 for Bulls, 2015 to 2024

Eight Utah elk management units finished in the top 10 for bull harvest in every year from 2015 to 2024: Manti, Wasatch Mountains, Fishlake/Thousand Lakes, Yellowstone, Vernal/Bonanza, Chalk Creek, Morgan-South Rich and North Slope, Summit. Together they took 50.5% to 56.5% of the state's bulls in each of the ten years, going by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources' unit table. The lead inside that group changed hands, from Wasatch Mountains to Manti, and unit totals follow permits and hunter effort as well as elk, so the list works as a scouting filter and says nothing about draw odds.

The Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) prints a table of total bull elk harvest by management unit in its annual big game report, and the 2024 edition runs from 2015 through 2024. We ranked the units within each year and asked which ones never dropped below tenth. Eight did, and in 2024 order they are Manti (16B), Wasatch Mountains (17), Fishlake/Thousand Lakes (25AB), Yellowstone (9A), Vernal/Bonanza (9BD), Chalk Creek (6), Morgan-South Rich (4) and North Slope, Summit (8A).

The highlighted bars are those eight, and they are also the eight largest totals of 2024. Nebo (16A, 231 bulls) and Book Cliffs (10, 215) took ninth and tenth that year, and neither is a fixture: Book Cliffs made the top 10 in seven of the ten years and Nebo in four. Because the eight fill eight of the ten places every year, the other 29 rows in the table compete for the last two. None of the eight ever finished lower than ninth, and one of them slipped that far in only four years: 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2023.

Read the last column as consistency. A 10 means the unit placed in the top 10 every year, and the zeros mean it never did. Rank 15 is a tie in 2024: Beaver (22) and Boulder/Kaiparowits (25C/26) each show 172 bulls in the DWR table, and the table above lists Beaver.

Wasatch Mountains (17) held first place in 2015 with 944 bulls and again from 2017 through 2020, with 721, 897, 807 and 853. Manti (16B) led in 2016 with 832, then took the top spot back in 2021 with 869, ahead of Wasatch Mountains' 858 by 11 bulls. It has held it since: 907 in 2022, 928 in 2023 and 1,030 in 2024, when the margin over Wasatch Mountains (833) reached 197.

The handoff happened inside one pair of units. Manti and Wasatch Mountains were first and second in every one of the ten years. Together they took 1,713 of the state's 8,090 bulls in 2015 and 1,863 of 7,837 in 2024, which is 21.2% and 23.8%. Manti alone went from 9.5% of the state's bulls in 2015 to 13.1% in 2024.

Manti's total moved against the statewide one. Its 2024 count is 33.9% above its 2015 count, while the statewide count for 2024 is 3.1% below 2015's. The table cannot say why. More elk, more permits, more hunters afield or better reporting would each fit these numbers, and no single year separates them.

DWR describes its method in the same report. Harvest for limited-entry, antlerless and general-season hunts comes from mandatory online or telephone reporting, and DWR projects those reports by the number of permits to get estimates. It projects hunts, units and the statewide total separately, and it notes that unit estimates may not add up to the statewide totals.

Figure 2 shows the state's bull harvest as DWR prints it in its statewide elk harvest statistics table, and the shares in this paper are measured against that column. In three years the unit rows add up to more than that column: 7,339 against 7,338 in 2017, 7,852 against 7,758 in 2018 and 6,853 against 6,788 in 2019, the kind of gap DWR's note above allows.

Two more limits. The table has 37 rows, while DWR's methods text describes thirty wildlife management units, so some units appear as lettered rows such as 16A Nebo and 16B Manti, and we ranked rows as printed. And the table ends in 2024; we did not find a 2025 unit table. Unit totals are harvest estimates, not success rates or draw odds. A large total says hunters took many bulls in a unit and says nothing about how many elk live there.

A unit in the top 10 ten years running has cleared the bar through ten separate seasons, which one big year cannot show. That makes persistence the cheapest filter in this paper, and the eight names are where to start.

Then pull the numbers this paper lacks. DWR's 2024 tables for general-season hunts list hunters afield and success rate next to bull harvest for each unit, and those decide whether a big unit total reflects a good chance or a crowd. Manti's 1,030 and Wasatch Mountains' 833 are the two largest totals in the table, and neither is a success rate.

Rank the eight by direction as well as size, using the five years in the table. Manti has risen every year since 2020, from 731 to 869, 907, 928 and 1,030. Wasatch Mountains has stayed between 826 and 869 since 2021. Vernal/Bonanza peaked at 519 in 2022 and stood at 397 in 2024. The two rotating places deserve a look as well, because Book Cliffs passed the top-10 test in most years.

For a look at how another state's elk leaders behave over five seasons, see our paper on Wyoming elk hunt areas, and for an elk trend at the state level, our Montana elk and mule deer paper.