How we source and verify

Our sources

• Season dates come from the CPW Big Game Season Structure and the annual CPW brochures. CPW 2025–2029 Season Structure They live in one structured data file that drives the calendar graphic, the season tables, and the what's-open-now board — so those renderings can never disagree with each other. Sentences are the harder half: prose restates dates in plain English, and nothing about writing a sentence forces it to match the data file. So a separate check reads every season date written in prose across the site and fails if even one of them has drifted.
• Fees and draw dates come from CPW's own license and draw pages, read live and dated.
• Rules and legal claims trace to CPW regulations or the Colorado Revised Statutes, cited where the claim actually rests.
• Outfitter listings come from Colorado's official DORA/DPO registration data Colorado DORA/DPO dataset — we show each outfitter's real registration number so you can confirm it yourself. One caveat the state data cannot resolve for you: Colorado registers hunting guides and fishing/float outfitters under a single "outfitter" credential, and the record does not say which one an operation is. The registration number and status are official; which discipline an outfitter actually guides is our editorial layer, which is why we list one only once its own website confirms guided big-game hunting.

The verification discipline

Three rules govern every page:

1. Primary sources by default — and labelled when they aren't. Dates, fees, and legal claims trace to CPW, the Code of Colorado Regulations, or Colorado statute, not to other hunting blogs, and a source chip sits next to them so you can check the original. Two honest exceptions: when a claim is about another state, we cite that state's own wildlife agency rather than a Colorado one; and when no agency publishes the rule in plain text at all — federal travel-management rules spread across the Forest Service and BLM are the live example — we cite the best secondary explainer we can find and mark it as secondary in that page's source list, instead of dressing it up as official.
2. A visible last-verified date on every page. Freshness is the whole point — a regulations page with no date is one you can't trust, and the older Colorado hunting sites mostly have none.
3. We hedge instead of faking. When a fact turns on your specific unit, license, or a publication we couldn't verify to the day (sheep and goat dates, for instance, are set per hunt code), we say so and send you to the source rather than print a number that might be wrong.

The freshness engine

The what's-open-now board is computed at build time from the season-date file and rebuilt automatically every night, so the status you see reflects the current date — not a value someone typed months ago. That's the same reason we don't put years in our URLs: dated pages rot, so instead each page covers the current season and gets updated in place.

What we don't do

• We don't rebuild CPW's tools — we explain and link the Hunting Atlas and the draw system and teach you to use them.
• We don't rank or rate outfitters or sell placement.
• We don't invent draw odds or success rates; we point you to CPW's own reports.
• We are not CPW, and this is reference information, not legal advice — always confirm against the current CPW brochure before you apply or hunt. See the full disclaimer.

Found something wrong?

Tell us. Accuracy is the entire product, and a correction with a source is the most useful thing you can send: [email protected].