In the Midwest, you can walk into a shop, buy a hunting license over the counter and head straight for the fields.
But in states like Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, a limited number of licenses is doled out through a lottery system. It takes, on average, three to four years for your number to come up. Sometimes, it takes much longer.
“When you wait 18 years for a hunt, it’s a big deal,” said Chris Porter, chief operating officer of gohunt.com, a new Las Vegas-based hunting website.
That’s why many hunters in the West look for help planning their next trip: What will the weather be like? How many deer will be in a specific spot? What’s the terrain like?
In the past, answers could be difficult to come by and impossible to find in one place. That’s why the team behind gohunt.com saw an opportunity to launch a one-stop site with everything hunters need to know to plan their next big outing.
The website, a side business of gambling company Golden Gaming, offers a $149-per-year subscription to hunters in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. Staffers also are working on content for enthusiasts in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.
In addition to providing written content on such diverse topics as taxidermy and how to make elk chili, gohunt organizes states into geographical hunting units and offers specialized information and satellite images from each.
“(That) tells me what I need to wear, the kind of hunting I’ll be doing, and how to prepare,” said Lorenzo Sartini, gohunt’s founder and president.
Log onto gohunt.com, and you can access more than 700 unit profiles written by hunters who have traveled the sites and gathered firsthand experience. Each profile tells you which species roam the land and which weapons you might want to use according to the time of year.
In early fall, for instance, you might choose a bow to hunt deer, because they’re easier to find. Near the start of winter, you’ll likely want to use a long-range rifle, because game can be more elusive.
Then there’s a season-by-season description of each unit, offering insight into how hunters fared in the past. Scrolling through listed dates, you can see where a species is likely to live and how many animals have been collected in a specific spot over the years.
Gohunt also hopes to make buying landowner tags a simpler process. The tags, which give a hunter exclusive access to a particular piece of land for the duration of their hunt, cost between $1,500 and $15,000. Typically, they’re distributed through third-party sources using telephone systems, scheduled appointments or snail mail. Gohunt’s tag marketplace lets hunter shop more quickly online.
The traditional process “was the most frustrating thing in the world,” Sartini said. “I would’ve rather gone to the dentist than buy landowner tags.”
There’s simpler information too, like notes on areas that offer limited cellphone service. A hunter also can choose where to stay based on the site’s hotel recommendations.
The gohunt team hopes to expand its reach across the United States over the next five years and then into other parts of the world.