Which states have hunt unit boundaries you can actually carry offline

Every state wildlife agency publishes its unit boundaries somewhere. Almost none of them publish it in a form you can carry into a canyon with no signal: a PDF in the regulations booklet, a web map that needs a connection, a shapefile buried on a GIS portal. We spent months turning 47 states' worth of agency data into one offline layer, and this is the honest accounting of it — including the three states we could not do, and why.

If you want the companion question, how much public land each state has open to hunting, that is a separate post. This one is about the lines the agencies draw on top of it.

What a "unit" is called depends on the state

An app that only understands one of these words does not actually cover the country. The same idea — the area your tag is valid in — goes by at least a dozen names:

The 47 states, and where each one comes from

Three groups, because they were solved three different ways.

33 states publish a statewide unit layer through their wildlife agency's own GIS service. Those are the straightforward ones: we read the agency's shapes, carry the agency's names, and link each unit to the agency's regulations page.

13 states manage by county. The "unit" is the county line plus the agency's zone assignment, so the boundary is derived from county geometry. Kentucky and Michigan appear in both groups because they run a species-specific unit layer and county-level zones.

3 states split into named zones that are neither a statewide unit layer nor plain counties. Alabama, Maryland and Mississippi define their zones by roads and rivers in the regulations text, and no agency file exists. We reconstructed those lines from the named highways, and the map says so on every one of them.

On top of all of that sit the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service refuge hunt units — 2,289 designated hunt tracts across the National Wildlife Refuge system, nationwide, including the three states below.

Unit counts are what is on our map today. They differ from an agency's own tally where a state splits units into sub-areas, or where we carry more than one species layer.

The three we could not do: Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota

Each of these has a specific reason, and we would rather tell you than leave a blank on the map and hope you do not notice.

Louisiana. LDWF defines its deer areas in the regulations text, and the text is not reconstructable. One boundary follows the centreline of Catahoula Lake, which has no canonical geometry. Another follows a railroad by a name it has not carried since the Illinois Central merged into CN in 1998. A third follows an unnamed levee. More than 20 parishes are split between areas. Until LDWF publishes the areas as GIS, the honest line is nothing.

Oklahoma. ODWC serves its antlerless zones as an image — a map service with no queryable features — and the zone-to-county mapping exists only as a picture in the regulations guide. There is nothing to read.

South Dakota. GFP publishes its deer hunt units only behind a stored-credential ArcGIS proxy that returns 403 anonymously. The data exists; the public is not allowed to fetch it.

The line to land on is this: reachable is not the same as allowed, and a stale boundary is worse than a missing one. We would rather show you nothing than show you last season's line. In all three states, the refuge hunt units still appear, because those come from the federal layer.

What we deliberately do not put on the shape

Bag limits, season dates, weapon restrictions, CWD surveillance status, draw results. Those change every season and are not carried on the boundary. The layer tells you where the line is; the agency tells you what the rules are, and every unit on the map links to its agency's current regulations page for exactly that reason.

Nothing here is for regulatory use. Where we reconstructed a line from the regulations text (Alabama, Maryland, Mississippi) the unit says so, and where a state manages by county the map is only as current as the agency's zone list. If your state's line is wrong, tell us — the fix is usually upstream at the agency, and we rebuild the layer on a schedule.

How to use it in the field

Turn on the Hunting Units layer under Boundaries. Tap a unit for its name, its agency, and the link to that agency's regulations. Then download the region before you leave signal — the unit layer is part of the offline pack, and it is on the free tier. That is the whole workflow.

Every state has a page on our site with its units, its parcel coverage, and its regulation links — for example Colorado, Montana, Wisconsin and Texas. Pick yours from the state list.

Counts taken from the live map on 2026-09-04. The hunt unit layer rebuilds weekly from each agency's service; its current age is on the data freshness page.