Six Wyoming Mule Deer Areas Have Stayed in the Buck Harvest Top 10 Since 2021

Hunters killed an estimated 651 mule deer bucks in Southeast Wyoming (hunt area 15) in 2025, the most of any of the state's 126 mule deer hunt areas, and six areas were in the buck harvest top 10 in every season from 2021 to 2025. We took the Wyoming Game and Fish Department's yearly harvest tables and asked which areas keep turning up near the top. A buck total counts what hunters brought in, so it tracks the number of people hunting and the licenses they held. The six names make a sensible place to begin scouting, and they say little about your own odds.

Wyoming's statewide buck harvest touched a five-season low in 2023, at 12,611, against 16,133 in 2021 and 15,783 in 2025. Six areas stayed in the top 10 straight through that dip: Southeast Wyoming, Baggs, Laramie Peak, Northwest Gillette, Clearmont and Crook. To find them we ranked all 126 hunt areas by estimated buck harvest in each season, summing across weapons and license classes.

Southeast Wyoming's 651 in 2025 was the highest figure, ahead of Baggs at 526, Laramie Peak at 450, Northwest Gillette at 444 and Clearmont at 434. Crook holds the last of the ten spots at rank 10 with 323. Four areas out-ranked Crook in 2025 without a full streak: South Converse (367), Bates Hole-Hat Six (362), Wind River (344) and Bearlodge (337) reached the top 10 in two, three, three and one of the five seasons.

Baggs and Laramie Peak also hold persistent places on the elk list, which our Wyoming elk paper covers. The state numbers deer areas and elk areas separately. Baggs is area 82 for deer and 21 for elk, and Laramie Peak is 64 for deer and 7 for elk.

A ranking by bucks hides how many people were in the field. According to the 2025 deer report, Southeast Wyoming's 651 bucks came from 1,438 active hunters, and the report lists their success at 51.3 percent. Baggs, second with 526 bucks, had 1,659 active hunters and a listed success of 31.7 percent.

The next pair shows the same split. Northwest Gillette (444 bucks, 1,184 hunters, 37.8 percent) and Clearmont (434 bucks, 888 hunters, 49.7 percent) sit side by side in the buck column and well apart in the hunter and success columns. The success percentages count any deer taken. In Baggs every deer counted was a buck (526 of 526), so the rate there is a buck rate. In Southeast Wyoming, does and fawns add 86 to the 651 bucks.

Statewide in 2025, residents took 10,371 of the 15,783 bucks and nonresidents took 5,412. Three of the six leaders break that pattern. Nonresidents took 296 of Northwest Gillette's 444 bucks, 265 of Clearmont's 434 and 187 of Crook's 323. In the other three, residents took more: 428 of 651 in Southeast Wyoming, 296 of 526 in Baggs and 283 of 450 in Laramie Peak.

Inside Northwest Gillette, the report shows 647 resident hunters with a listed success of 22.9 percent and 537 nonresident hunters at 55.9 percent. The same area and season gave the two groups very different outcomes.

State regulation caps nonresident general deer licenses region by region, so the nonresident share of a leader's total is partly a policy setting, and policy settings get amended. If you hunt as a resident, read the resident rows. If you hunt as a nonresident, read the nonresident rows and the cap for your region.

The department's ten-year table lists mule deer licenses beside the harvest. Licenses ran 65,862 in 2021, 58,828 in 2022, 47,456 in 2023, 46,936 in 2024 and 49,179 in 2025. Buck harvest ran 16,133, 15,717, 12,611, 14,179 and 15,783 across the same seasons. Both series dip and then recover, though licenses bottomed out a year after bucks did. The report does not say why licenses fell, and we will not guess.

Against that backdrop, single-area swings are easy to see and hard to explain. Baggs dropped from 875 bucks in 2022 to 286 in 2023, a fall of 589. West Green River (area 135) went from 574 to 84 the same year and has climbed back only as far as 291. We found no explanation in the tables we read.

The Montana paper follows the same species over a longer stretch and finds the estimated mule deer harvest 43.3 percent lower in 2025 than in 2004.

Each deer figure starts as an emailed questionnaire. The report rests on 21,104 responses to a voluntary survey sent to 51,668 license holders, scaled up to the 63,100 licenses issued, for mule deer and white-tailed deer together. The Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center conducts the surveys on the department's behalf. We used the mule deer hunt-area table only.

Confidence intervals (90 percent, in the report's herd-unit table) exist only at the herd-unit level. The Baggs herd unit's 2025 buck estimate is 600, with an interval running from 541 to 659. Hunt areas get no interval, so treat close neighbors as ties. South Converse (367) and Bates Hole-Hat Six (362) are five bucks apart, and nobody should read that as a ranking.

A buck total answers a narrower question than success rate or draw odds. The report gives licenses issued and active hunters and carries no application counts. Nor can it separate deer numbers from access, quotas and effort, so "hunters killed more" is as far as any of these figures goes.

Take the six as the places to read further, then let your license pick among them. A resident should sort by the resident rows, a nonresident by the nonresident rows, and either one should rank the areas by the report's success column for that group before looking at the buck total.

Discount one big year. Baggs recorded 875 bucks in 2022 and 286 the next season, and either figure alone would mislead you. Keep the areas that held a top-10 place through the bad season, which these six did in 2023.

The Data Hunter's Field Guide covers other ways agency deer numbers mislead hunters.