Five years ago, I pulled a first rifle elk tag off Colorado’s leftover list. It was a very exciting thing. It may also have been the worst thing that could have happened to me. Let me explain.
I live in Colorado, so I know this system inside and out. Every week starting in early August, CPW posts a list of tags that hunters have turned back in — the reissue list goes up on Tuesdays, and those tags go on sale the next day at a specific time. Deer, elk, pronghorn. Some of them are tags people wait a decade of preference points to draw. And for one shining moment every week, they’re sitting there available to anyone fast enough to grab one.
The Ritual
If you’ve never done it, here’s how it goes. You log into CPWshop twenty or thirty minutes before the tags go on sale. You load up the hunt code you want. And then, minutes before the official sale time, you start clicking. Rapid-fire. Click, refresh, click, refresh — hoping against hope that you can pull that tag into your cart and complete the purchase before anybody else does the exact same thing. And that’s anybody, anywhere — these tags are open to residents and nonresidents alike, so you’re racing the whole country, not just Colorado.
Every week, I log in with a delusional sense of hope that this is the week I beat everyone to it.
Every week, that hope is followed by the same sense of disappointment when I don’t.
And here’s the thing — I know the odds. I know it’s a long shot that I complete that checkout before hundreds of other hunters hammering the same button. But even if there’s a 0.0001% chance of grabbing that tag, there’s still a chance. So every Wednesday, there I am. Clicking.
That’s what I mean when I say pulling that first rifle tag five years ago might be the worst thing that ever happened to me. Because I know it can happen. I’ve done it. And that one win has fueled five years of weekly logins, five years of delusional hope, five years of disappointment. The leftover list is a slot machine that paid out exactly once.
The Secret Is Out
When I grabbed that tag five years ago, the leftover list felt like inside knowledge — something Colorado hunters quietly passed around. Not anymore. The demand for these tags has increased substantially over the last five years. It’s gotten intense enough that CPW literally had to add bot protection — the system now runs reCAPTCHA and slaps delays on anyone who clicks “too fast,” because people were using autoclicker software to win the race. Think about that. The competition for turned-back tags got so fierce the state had to build defenses against it.
I don’t blame a single hunter for wanting these tags. Colorado elk tags are some of the most sought-after in the West, and they’re only getting harder to draw. Everybody wants in, and the leftover list is the last legal shortcut.
But selfishly? I wish the rules were different. Part of me wishes leftover tags were available to Colorado residents only. We live here, we scout here, we pay taxes here — is it crazy to think residents should get first crack at the tags that come back? Or is that just the delusion talking, dressed up as policy?
Is That Fair to Wish?
I genuinely go back and forth on it. Nonresident dollars fund a huge share of what CPW does, and the West has enough resident-versus-nonresident fights going on already. Maybe the free-for-all is the fairest version — everybody clicking, everybody with the same 0.0001%.
So I’ll put it to you: should the system change? Residents-only? A weekly lottery instead of a click race? Or should we all just keep logging in every Wednesday with our delusional sense of hope, clicking that button like it owes us something?
Hit reply, comment, or come argue with me about it — I mean it, I want to hear where other hunters land on this. We’ll be kicking it around on the Hunt Podcast too.
And if you’re done gambling on the click race: this is exactly why we book hunts on private land with landowner vouchers and guaranteed tags. A North Park private-land elk hunt or a GMU 55 hunt in the Gunnison country doesn’t require winning a race at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday. Browse the hunts — or don’t, and I’ll see you on the leftover list, clicking.
Hunting is not a hobby. It’s an obsession.
— Kurt
