It's been a very busy start to 2016 for those of us working to get Toprut.com launched and available. The last couple of days we've taken a little time to reflect on all that has occurred since the site went live in early January of this year. A few thoughts:

• Gathering, organizing and presenting the information accurately has taken more time than we originally had planned. We hoped to be further along with our state by state offering by now.


• Every state’s data has its own unique set of challenges and often requires clarification. We’re starting to build some fantastic relationships with the great people inside the state wildlife agencies and are excited about the direction this may take in the future.


• The feedback we have received through the site itself and across other conversations happening online has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s clear that an organized and open western hunt reference is something that a lot of people are looking for.


• If you make something that people want, word travels fast. The overall traffic we’ve received to the site continues to exceed any expectations we had when we launched 3 months ago.


• We have a lot more work to do!

Going forward we will continue to gather and publish more state draw and harvest information. We had originally intended to publish Montana next but given that the 2016 Montana deer/elk application deadline has now passed we will probably focus our energy on Wyoming deer and Idaho instead. Over time we will publish draw, harvest and age/population data for every western state and species.

We are very anxious to get the latest information from the state of Arizona for the 2016 elk/antelope draw. Historically the official draw reports released by the state made it difficult or impossible to get a complete picture of all aspects of the draw process. And with the changes to the nonresident tag allocation this year we think the community is anxious to see what impact it had across the board. Arizona began charging successful applicants credit cards late last week and the official draw results should be available in the next couple of weeks.

We are also actively working with the state of Nevada to get everything that is required to accurately reflect draw odds in that state. The conversations we have had with everyone at the Nevada Department of Wildlife have been fantastic and we are super excited to continue to work with them on an ongoing basis.

As the 2016 application season continues to wind down we will begin to shift the focus of some of our content more toward hunt planning. As an example, we’re going to be adding a mapping library that is a compilation of downloadable Google Earth files that we have accumulated and processed from state wildlife agencies, the US Forest Service, US Fish & Wildlife, BLM and others. If you’d like to help us test and evaluate the early release of this map library, send an email to maps@toprut.com and we will put you on our beta list.

Finally, we’d love to hear from you about the type of content that you find most valuable. From the beginning we set out with a goal to build something that was a little unique from the status quo. And although we enjoy reading harvest success stories and looking at trophy pictures as much as the next person, our vision for Toprut is something different. We’ve kicked around some crazy ideas.

Tell us your thoughts about where we should be headed.