Laramie Peak Led Wyoming's 2025 Elk Bull Harvest With an Estimated 783

Laramie Peak (hunt area 7) produced Wyoming's largest bull elk harvest in 2025, an estimated 783 bulls, and six of the state's 103 elk hunt areas ranked in the top 10 in every year from 2021 to 2025. We added up the Wyoming Game and Fish Department's published harvest tables by hunt area and followed the leaders across five seasons. Those totals depend on licenses and access as well as on elk, and the six leaders are licensed in very different ways. A hunter shortlisting areas needs to read that before reading the ranks.

We ranked every Wyoming elk hunt area by estimated bull harvest for each season from 2021 to 2025, then asked which areas stayed near the top. In 2025 the state's hunt-area rows add up to 13,188 bulls, up from 10,385 in 2021. Six areas held a top-10 rank in all five years. Laramie Peak (area 7) is first, followed by Baggs (area 21) with 606, the Non-herd unit (area 129) with 526, Wiggins Fork (area 67) with 478, Iron Mountain (area 6) with 321 and Upper Platte River (area 110) with 279.

The order inside the six keeps moving. Laramie Peak climbed from 568 bulls in 2021 to 912 in 2024, then slipped to 783. Baggs went the other way, falling from 630 to 414 in 2023 before recovering to 606. Wiggins Fork jumped from 292 in 2024 to 478 in 2025. Areas that made the top 10 only some years, such as Steamboat (four of five) and Shirley Mountain (three of five), sit close enough in size that a single season decides who gets in.

Two of these names, Baggs and Laramie Peak, also show up on the mule deer list in our companion paper on Wyoming mule deer. Each species has its own hunt-area numbering, so Baggs is area 21 here and area 82 there. Do not assume the two Baggs areas cover the same ground.

Third on the 2025 list, with 526 bulls, is a hunt area the state labels a Non-herd unit. The Game and Fish Commission's elk seasons regulation, dated April 22, 2026, describes area 129 as all of Campbell, Crook, Johnson, Natrona and Sheridan counties, excluding land inside the other numbered elk hunt areas. It works as a catch-all for elk outside any named unit. A department hunt forecast from 2019 described the elk there as living in small, scattered herds, mostly on private land, and said finding access mattered before going out.

The 2025 elk report shows all 526 bulls came on general licenses. The cow and calf licenses sold for the area recorded no bulls. Nonresident hunters took 235 of the 526.

Bull harvest there rose in each of the five seasons: 226, 276, 344, 444, then 526. That is more than double the 2021 figure. Hunters killed more bulls every year, and the tables cannot say whether the cause is more elk, more licensed hunters, more permission on private ground or better survey coverage. If you take this area seriously, start with permission. Our permission playbook covers how.

The same 2025 report breaks each area's bulls out by license. Laramie Peak has no general-license row at all. Its 783 bulls came on two limited-quota licenses: 685 on Type 1 and 98 on Type 2. The report lists quotas of 1,500 for Type 1 and 350 for Type 2.

The other five look different. Baggs, the Non-herd unit and Upper Platte River took every one of their 2025 bulls on general licenses (606, 526 and 279). Wiggins Fork took 447 of its 478 that way and Iron Mountain 300 of 321, with the rest on limited-quota licenses (31 on Type 9 and 21 on Type 1).

Caps on those licenses move. Nonresident general elk licenses are issued by region: area 129 and Iron Mountain sit in the Eastern region, Baggs and Upper Platte River in the Southern, Wiggins Fork in the Western, and Laramie Peak in none because it has no general license. The Eastern cap reads 1000 in the April 22, 2026 regulation and 600 in the public copy of the code that shows it as amended May 23, 2024. We did not find the text in force for 2025, so we cannot say which applied. Laramie Peak's Type 2 quota was 350 in the 2025 report and 500 in the 2026 regulation.

Statewide, licenses rose from 74,523 in 2021 to 84,088 in 2025 (Table 2 of the report), in the same seasons that estimated bull harvest rose from 10,385 to 13,188. Those lines move together, and the report draws no connection between them.

Every figure here is a survey estimate. The University of Wyoming's survey center runs the department's harvest surveys. For elk in 2025, 25,355 of the 60,925 license holders surveyed answered the voluntary questionnaire, and the department scaled those answers to the 84,088 licenses issued. Our totals add every season, weapon and license type inside a hunt area, for bulls only. The state defines a bull as any branch-antlered adult male, which excludes spikes.

The department publishes uncertainty ranges for herd units and none for hunt areas. Where no range exists, close neighbors are effectively tied: Shirley Mountain (229), Steamboat (226) and Lower Hoback (221) fill ranks 8 to 10 within eight bulls of each other.

A total is also no success rate. Upper Platte River ranks sixth with 279 bulls, yet the department's success column puts its hunters at 27.5 percent overall. Iron Mountain ranks fifth with 321 bulls and 49.7 percent. Those percentages count every elk taken, cows and calves included, so they are not bull-only rates either. The report's tables list licenses sold and active hunters, and none lists applicants, so nothing in it measures draw odds. And a high total says hunters killed many bulls in an area. It does not say the area holds more elk.

Start from the license you can get. If you buy general licenses, the five general areas are where the record shows bulls coming out, and a nonresident's region, the one the license was issued for, decides which of them can be hunted. If you draw, Laramie Peak's quota is the number to check, using the current regulation and not last year's report.

Use the five-year range as your error bar. Baggs ran from 414 to 630 bulls and Laramie Peak from 568 to 912. An area earns a place on your list by staying near the top, so drop any name that led once and vanished.

Treat area 129 as a permission project. Hunters took a growing number of bulls there, and the department's 2019 description put most of the elk on private land.

One species' list says little about another's. Montana's estimates, in our Montana paper, put elk harvest up 17.2 percent and mule deer harvest down 43.3 percent from 2004 to 2025.