Rick Searcy

For over three decades, I've chased elk across all ten western states — from the dark timber of Wyoming to the roadless backcountry of Montana and everywhere in between. Every year it starts the same way: months of research before a single application goes in. Draw odds buried in state PDFs. Harvest data on one website, season dates on another. Forum posts from five years ago that may or may not still be relevant. I'd spend hundreds of hours piecing it all together, and I knew every serious western hunter was doing the exact same thing.

I also happen to have spent 25 years as a software engineer, more recently focused on data science and AI. At some point the two worlds collided and the question became obvious: what if all of that scattered data lived in one place, and an AI could help you make sense of it? That's HuntPilot — draw odds from all ten western states, harvest statistics, season dates, herd survey data, trophy records, and an AI advisor that actually understands western big game hunting. Not because it was trained on generic outdoor content, but because it's grounded in the real data.

HuntPilot was built by a hunter, for hunters. As a published writer in the western hunting space and someone who lives and breathes this stuff every fall, I wanted a tool that answered the questions I was already asking myself every application season. That's why every feature — the draw simulators that model each state's actual mechanics, the point creep analysis, the strategy optimizer — exists. This isn't software made by people who don't hunt. It's what I wished I'd had for the last twenty years.