Not gonna get in a pissin match fellas, just simply put we see things differently.....but let me throw a few idea out there for those that are reading or interested in this....
First off just a couple of numbers I pulled off the DNR website yesterday. From 08 to 2011, I think that was the last reported year. the antlerless harvest numbers remain remarkably stable across the entire unit, hovering around 12 hundred cows.
What's awfully curious about this, and I couldn't find this number is that the cow tags offered and sold between those times fluctuates quite a bit if my mind serves me correctly, I may be wrong but for some reason I think the tag allotments went something like this 2008:3300, 09:3300, 2010:1500, 11:3300 2011 being the first year after the most recent flyover.
If you go look at the numbers 08 and 09 were fairly stable in 2010 they cut the tags in half, and the harvest showed a modest decline due to that. Nothing to write home about here is where it gets dicey. this years harvest report will tell a lot more of the story, but in 2011 the tags more than doubled, 1500 back up to 3300 however on 2/3's of the unit, the harvest dropped! the other 1/3 Wasatch west, for an increase of like a 1000 tags only killed 200 more elk.....
Now I can almost promise you its not cause the hunters or equipment are getting worse, so that leaves one option the elk weren't there.
Now saddles and sneak, I don't dispute the numbers that the DNR has posted about the unit. There may very well be 7700 head of elk on this unit, the problem is that the hunters can't access a large portion of them due to private land IE: AF canyon, Hobble creek, Reservation ridge on the south end, the avintaquin, wolf creek ranches, little pole CWMU, 3C's CWMU, and currant creek all hold large herds with large amounts of inaccessible land. So their answer in order to attempt to deal with the legislative requirements is to issue large amounts of antlerless tags on the central third of the unit year after year. So our (hunters) public land huntable elk continue to take a beating year after year while the problem goes unsolved and continues to get worse.
One other thing of note that is very very alarming to the average joe hunter that wants to hunt the Wasatch in the near future, the strawberry valley nursery's have seen a dramatic reduction in cows and calves. From what was pretty consistent from 180-220 elk in 3-4 nursery's to 40-60. The harvest data supports that it's what we have seen. The next several years will be interesting to see how the public land herd on the snatch reacts.