North to the Future. North to the Last Great Frontier.

Oryx Hunting New Mexico --The Malpai

2011-11-24T10:18:00.003-09:00

For the second time in 2011, I made a trip to south central New Mexico to take on Oryx hunting. With the hopes of another successful hunt, I arrived in Albuquerque at a friends house the evening of November 7th after leaving Fairbanks Alaska that morning. Early on the 8th, my dad arrived with the truck loaded and ready to go. We headed south. Leaving Fairbanks a snowy winter wasteland, the low 70's temperature was most welcomed. We pulled into our camp (the same location as in January) and set up. With a couple hours left to kill before dark we put the rifle in the truck and went for a cruise on some dirt roads in the area to check for sign. The first official day of our hunt go underway at 3:00am on the 9th and we headed to the water hole in hopes of catching some oryx off guard but it quickly became apparent that with increased hunting pressure, the oryx had become well adjusted and were long gone by dawn. Fresh track littered the area indicating good numbers were there throughout the night mingling around. We headed back to camp and had a nice breakfast before hitting the dirt with the truck looking for gemsbok. We talked to a couple other hunters along the way and all seemed to think the Malpais were a good place to hunt but the terrain is vicious and unwelcoming. They are a place of legend in New Mexico, a place you generally try to avoid. Depending on who you talk to the name Malpai roughly translates to Badlands or Evil Country. Either way, its not a place where you generally go for a leisurely hike! We opted to keep to the water holes much like we did in January that proved productive. A couple more days went by and we found ourselves empty handed on Friday. It was time to mix it up a bit. My dad's friend and a friend of mine was coming down today so that's a bit more help and my dads friend has an Oryx tag to fill as well. We picked up camped and moved forty miles further east and met up with the two guys who came in and after some drinks and talk it was decided that we were going to go ahead and go into the Malpai to check it out. I looked up the area on a couple different websites and they were fairly similar. Both warned travelers of dangers and essentially frowned upon the idea. What I found interesting was what the Indians believed them to be and their history during the wild west days of America. According to Legends of America .com, "Navajo legend says that this lava is the blood of the great giant who was slain by the Twin War Gods in the Zuñi Mountains. Here in this area lies the remains of deserted pueblos, caves of perpetual ice, hideouts of Old West outlaws, and numerous tales of buried treasure". After three of us took a six mile hike into the Lava fields on Saturday the 12th, we understood exactly why, its incredibly easy to get turned around as you meander up and down, everything looks the same. It honestly reminded me much like hunting on the open tundra. There are no apparent land marks to visually mark your location. After a long first day in the Malpai with no Oryx sightings were not discouraged. All day long we had jumped deer and saw many signs of oryx moving around. They were in the Malpai but, it will proved difficult to find and approach any of them. We settled into camp for the night and planned on hitting the Malpai yet again the next day. Sunday morning rolled in and we were in the Badlands pre-dawn. We were gaining ground, I spooked a herd of twenty Oryx. They saw me 1/4 mile away and were gone in haze of gray moving against the sage covered flow of giants blood. We covered a good eight miles on foot before calling it a day and went back to camp for a hearty dinner. We were making progress, we have an area, albeit tough area, that oryx were currently in, it was just a matter of sticking to it until we got a good position on them. My friend left to head back to Albuquerque and my dad and his friend were exhausted but I kept up the talk of going back into the Lava fields and finally convinced them to go again early Monday morning. It had been seven days since I've showered last, I was getting a bit tired of looking at sharp black rock and yucca but I felt we were getting close. on our approach to the Malpai that morning, we spotted three nice bull oryx feeding near a small waterhole. The plan was that I would cut them off from behind by going into the Malpai in the dark and out flanking them. I thought I was doing well since I had gone in nearly a half mile before cutting over to the bulls but our plan backfired when I looked up and saw a juvenile Oryx a hundred yards in front of me. There were just three bulls but, a herd of fifty scattered around in the vicinity and this juvenile was in no inquisitive mood. He sounded the alarm for the herd by plowing down into the bunch running and the rest followed suit stampeding away from me. I watched them and they slowed to a walk about a half mile into the Malpai and I went to work. I toss the rifle sling over my shoulder and began to jog. I covered a couple miles on their flank out of sight and finally popped up in an area where I figured I could find a bull in the herd and finish this hunt off. The gods were against me because I spooked five white deer that were bedded down and they jumped up into view of the herd prancing away which startled the oryx and in a matter of seconds I found myself another half mile away. I was already a good four miles in for the morning and made the decision to head back to the truck to get water before I went after them again. I made it back to the truck and found that my dad and his friend were not there but I noticed footprints headed into the Malpai. I grabbed my pack and slowly worked my way back in. I found them about a mile in and we split up to cover more ground and also spook oryx to eachother. We must have covered in excess of eight miles and saw a good half dozen oryx but none were worth taking. We never did see that herd of fifty that day. We got back to the truck around 3:00pm and we started to head out back to camp and low and behold going forty miles an hour down a lonely stretch of road I spotted a decent oryx, blatantly standing in the desert. It was good enough to fill at least one of the two tags and we made quick work of the situation and thirty minutes later we were driving along with the second tagged oryx of 2011. I have to say, the malpai is a good place to hunt but I also say this as a warning, it is NOT a friendly place to be. GPS, and an abundance of water is absolutely recommended. Also something to think about... you can not access them with a vehicle or even a motorcycle. if you shoot an oryx or deer 5 fives in there, you will be hard pressed to get the meat out without covering some ground with a heavy pack and those bull oryx are probably a good 400 lbs gutted out. Anyway, a quick and dirty trip report. below is what the White Sands Missile Range had to say about the Mapais: "The malpais or "Bad Lands" are lava beds of relatively recent geological origin which flank White Sands Missile Range´s northern area. These beds are found both in the Jornada del Muerto on the range´s west boundary and east of the Sierra Oscura Mountains which are close to the range´s eastern boundary. The black broken and rough lava streams remain much as they were at the time formed. They are aptly described as "rivers of black basalt." According to Indian lore, the lava beds are the blood and bones of monsters from the Age of the Gods, an era in Indian pre-history in which all living creatures were believed to be giants. The malpais pose a thorny problem for White Sands Missile Range recovery crews bringing out missiles impacting in the rough terrain. Due to the nature of the lava streams, ordinary ground access is impossible. Deep crevasses appear to the eye as narrow fissures, and the lips of a crevasse are often crusts of volcanic ash which give way under a man´s weight. Therefore, missiles that impact in the lava beds are sought out by helicopter. Then, recovery crews fly in and harness the missile parts to the helicopter which flies both crew and missile parts to headquarters area." --http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/WSHist/RegionalHist/Pages/TheMalpaisandAreaForts.aspx

Upper Chena River Cow Moose

2011-09-04T12:59:00.011-08:00

Well I pulled a permit for cow moose on the upper Chena River this year so it was time to get some moose meat. I drove up and camped on the West Fork of the Chena where it crossed the highway on August 31st and camped out after having driven the road a bit looking for decent bogs to scope in the morning. I didn't even bother with a tent and just crashed in the truck. I finally managed to drag myself out of the sleeping bag and started to drive the road up and down slowly stopping to walk into the woods to check the bogs I had scoped out. It was pretty quick at first but around 7:30 I popped out of the woods onto a bog and there were two cows and a young bull all feeding. The bull had noticed me since he was the closest at under 75 yards but didn't do much except stare at me for a couple minutes before continuing to eat. I was looking at the cows and at my area map. I was right on the border of where I was allowed to shoot a cow and I hadn't picked up my general harvest ticket so I couldn't shoot the bull. I really should have gotten the general harvest ticket so I could have shot the bull and just skipping the cow permit. In the end after watching them for fifteen minutes I decided that this particular bog was just too close to the edge of my area and while I believe it was still in the correct drainage, I didn't want to take a chance. I backed off and got back in the truck. My thinking was that I would go around to the far end of the bog up in the trees well into my area and after they are done feeding the cows would wonder up into me and I would feel more comfortable shooting one then since they would be further into the legal area. I spent a good thirty minutes walking around the bog well out of sight and sound and was about to work my way up into the trees when gunshots rang out. Someone has spotted the young bull and dropped him. This is Alaska hunting, not the lower 48! But when its moose season the woods are plainly full of people on 4-wheelers and crazies. At any rate, I wasn't in position yet and surely the cows ran up past me. Such is life. I walked back out to the truck and checked a few different bogs and wondered around on foot for a couple hours but didn't see any more moose. I called it for the morning and went home and took a nap. Evening came around and I went back out to walk some trails up a valley bottom. I saw plenty of track but not much recent activity. I was pretty confident the bulk of the moose were still down low on river. I got home 11:30pm and didn't get an early start the next morning as planning. I rolled out of bed at 9:00 am got up to the trail about 10:30 am. I hiked in a good mile and a half up the river on the far side to avoid the massive amounts of hunters with 4-wheelers on the highway side. I was hoping the moose crossed over with all the ATV traffic the last couple days. I finally popped out on the river after an hour of hiking and sat on the bank to grab a drink of water. As I was shuffling through my backpack, a cow moose popped out up stream from me about fifty yards. I had roused her from her mid-day bed and she was moving on. She made fairly quick work of the Chena River and I waited patiently for her to clear the water and step up on the bank on the other side. I took my shot about 75 yards. It was a solid heart hit. She buckled back and try to cross back over the river to where I was standing but died about thirty feet from where I had shot her with the .300 short magnum resting right in the middle of the river. ugh. this was going to be a lot of work to deal with alone. There are not very many butchering situations that are more difficult than in water and mud. I tied a leg with rope and then tied her off to a tree on the bank so I wouldn't lose her. I started by taking both top quarters off in the knee deep water of the Chena hanging the meat from a tree to dry with each piece I cut. Back and forth from the tree to the middle of the Chena I worked for a couple hours until one side of the Cow was stripped of meat and gutted out. The river actually made gutting a breeze as the current washed and took all of it down stream as it was pulled out. With the cow a good three hundred pounds lighter I was able to grab a leg and work her up closer to shore in shallower water and get her flipped over. I repeated the process and after a good four hours I was sitting on the bank eating a granola bar with all the meat hanging from the tree drying. I covered the meat with game bags and grabbed a front quarter and hiked the mile and half back to the truck. I decided it would be easier to drive the truck up the highway until I was perpendicular to the moose and then bush whack the two tenths of a mile down to the river and cross with waders, shuttling the loads of meat that way cutting down the mileage I had to carry it. It worked out quite well and having crossed that river in waders a good half dozen times with heavy loads I had the entire cow loaded up in the truck. It took nearly seven hours from the shot to sitting down in the drivers seat to head home completely exhausted. I gave a couple quarters away and hung it at a friends house for the night. The next morning, I tossed the her back into the truck and took her up the road to where some friends were slaughtering pigs and after the pigs, she was hung and butchered up. A Chena River Cow permit is a pretty simple moose hunt. Although, I'll definitely think twice about moose hunting by myself next time. Caribou are small and easy but, even a cow moose is a lot of work for one person to manage. So with that, Moose season ended on day two this year. I wish all years it went that easy. Given the river was a pain to deal with.

Caribou Hunting Off The North Slope Haul Road (Sagavanirktok to Ivishak River)

2011-08-30T15:42:00.047-08:00

It is that time of year again. The days are a bit shorter, crisp air in the morning and people are starting to think about where they want to set up camp and call for moose or in my case stalk some caribou in the A.N.W.R. off the Dalton Highway on the Ivishak River once again. I had a stiff learning curve running up the Sagavanirktok and Ivishak Rivers last fall with a couple near disastrous mishaps. I do believe I will blame those on inexperience with shallow water river running and having only bought the boat a mere week before attempting the hunt in 2010. Now that I've had a go around and a year to run the boat pretty hard in various rivers such as the Gulkana, Little Susitna, Chena, and the Yukon and Dall Rivers as well. Roughly two months ago, I had the boat shop do a good one over on the motor to get it in prime condition so I wouldn't end up stranded with some silly mechanical issue. I've managed to have a fairly busy week having gone up the Steese Highway Monday to cow moose hunt. Unfortunately all we found was a little black bear on the way back Wednesday afternoon.

http://connect.garmin.com/player/109164930 Cow Moose. Twelvemile Summit: 4-Wheelers.

I had twenty-four hours to get the gear cleaned up the re-orgainized for Thursday morning after getting back into town Wednesday afternoon. I was a bit pressed for time but come Thursday, I was ready.

At any rate, ready as I'm going to be, Ben and I loaded up the truck and headed north. The truck bed was full as could be since we had decided to bring enough fuel with us to do the entire trip without having to stop and gas up paying ridiculous prices for gas (It was 5.40 per gallon in Coldfoot). So we had borrowed a thirty gallon poly and used all our five gallon cans and filled my boats two-nine gallon cans and tossed them all in the pickup totalling 68 gallons plus another 20 gallons in the truck tank.

We left Fairbanks about 1:30pm on Thursday afternoon arriving at the boat launch on a small braid of the Sagavanirktok about 11:00pm just a few miles north of Pump Station Two. We spoke with a man who had been running the river the last few days and grabbed a bit of beta on who was up river, where a

nd if there there caribou and all sounded well. We dry launched the boat since there wasn't enough water to float my boat at the launch which seems to be a problem every year. I'm glad it is to because it keeps most boats out of there. This hunt is truly for the small man handling tunnel flat bottom jets and air boats. There is of course, the random few who decide

they can do it with their Predator or Extreme Shallow and pretty much destroy their 40K boats on the trip, but hey they made it... kind of... After launching and loading up the boat with most of the gear which included 28 gallons of gas we pitched a tent next to the truck and crashed out about 12:30. We were up and boiling a bit of water for coffee by 6:00 am on Friday and revving the motor up shortly thereafter. We started out strong but within a couple minutes we found ourselves pulling the boat off of some rocks in a shallow portion of the Sag. We rounded a couple more corners before getting stuck again. This continued for a while until we made enough ground up river to get out into the main channel. In all the huss and fuss of pulling the boat off the rocks and making ground up stream, we completely missed the Ivishak confluence and had to turn around and go back down stream and then up into the Ivishak. We made pretty quick work of the Rivers up to camp once we got out into the main channels. By the time we stopped and set up camp we had been on the river for two hours and forty minutes

and covered 21.77 miles. If I had to do it again, it wouldn't take nearly as long. We had stopped several times to look at the GPS units and track out to the road to gauge the 5-mile minimum distance in addition to having to pull the boat of the rocks when we would get stuck. On the run up we spotted about ten caribou with a couple bulls in the group on the river just shy of the five mile marker. It was a welcomed sign as we continued up.

http://connect.garmin.com/player/110109640 ----Run To Ivishak Caribou Camp.

Once at camp we hastily unloaded some gear from the boat, set up the tent and headed to higher ground to take a look. A half hour later we spotted our first caribou and began to head in its direction over a small knob on the tundra. When we reached the top of the knob we spotted about forty caribou about a mile out.

They were too far off at the moment so we decided to continue on after the lone caribou we had spotted in front of us that was just down the other side of the hill somewhere out of sight. Fifteen minutes later we lucked out because we completely abandoned the lone caribou and focused on the herd as they had decided to come our way. Within no time, they were a couple hundred yards out in front of us and we opened up with the rifles. We shot four cows and a bull. Having already planned on taking cows for meat and possibly a bull or two it worked out perfectly. However, now we had five animals to gut and cut up. It wasn't until 11:30pm that we had all five back at camp and we sat down to cook up some bacon and eggs. luckily we made it back because before dinner was even done cooking a thick fog rolled up the valley and visibility was down to fifty feet. I was exhausted and barely managed to finish dinner before curling up in the sleeping bag to crash for the day. I was glad to have found the bou on the first morning, it will save us a day on this trip. Always a satisfying hunt when you have five animals hanging in camp on the first night. Last year I had shot two bulls on the first morning... Saturday morning rolled around and we slept in. Partly because of exhaustion from having to haul all the meat in packs making numerous trips and partly because the fog had not dissipated. It wasn't until 9:30am that the fog had lifted enough to really get the day going. We decided that we had enough weight in the boat that we were more comfortable in making a shuttle of sorts to get it out instead of one heavy trip. We packed the boat with all our gear and a little more than half the meat and headed down stream to the confluence of the Ivishak and Sag. We stashed the meat in a shady spot and turned around and buzzed back up to camp to pick up the remaining meat. Once back at the confluence with the second load we sat down and ate a bit of lunch in the sun on the cut bank. This was the bulk of the trip back so we were a bit relieved to be at this point. Its always a little nerve racking while upstream because of the possibility of having mechanical issues and whatnot. I'm generally relieved when I've cut that distance back to the truck. In the process of having to do this meat shuttle we covered 40.51 miles by river.

http://connect.garmin.com/player/110109760 Shuttling Meat to Sag/Ivishak Confluence.

We loaded up the bulk of the meat once more and continued down the Sag to the braid that would lead us to the to the boat launch and made a meat stash again and returned to the confluence to pick up the remaining meat. Once back at the turn off to the braid we decided to just pack the boat with all the meat and make a run for the boat launch. We made it down having only to pull the boat off the rocks a couple times. This final leg of the return was 10.47 river miles.

http://connect.garmin.com/player/110109767 Meat Shuttle from Sag/Ivishak Confluence to Boat Launch.

Ben and I didn't hang around the launch very long, we loaded up the boat and truck and were on our way pretty quick. We did get visited by a trooper while we were loading up who questioned us about our tags, licenses, and meat retention. However, soon enough, we were pulling back out onto the Dalton Highway around 3:30pm. We stopped in Coldfoot to eat but we still had plenty of gas in the poly so we filled up a little further down the road at the Koyukuk crossing. We eventually made our way back into Fairbanks and got the meat set out in a cool basement for the remainder of the night and I crashed by 3:00am. I was up and about by 10:00 am Sunday and we were cutting up the meat and putting it into the freezer by lunch time. Another quick trip up north that went well. No complaints.

I'm putting a few needed waypoints for the trip. Feel free to use them or drop me a line for questions or additional points etc. I'd like to know if you do use them. Just curious if people actually are using them.. If so I might add more on future ventures.

Pump Station #2 N 69 27'31.5" W 148 33'32.3"
Dalton Turn Off To Boat Launch N 69 34'04.3" W 148 37'06.8"
Boat Launch N 69 34'10.8" W 148 36'27.6"
Sag Braid Leading Down To Boat Launch From Main Channel N 69 31'59.1" W 148 32'49.6"

Ivishak/Sagavanirktok Confluence N 69 30'15.4" W 148 30'17.8"

Echooka/Ivishak Confluence N 69 25'01.4" W 148 16'24.1"

Yukon River to Ray and Dall Rivers for Pike Fishing

2011-08-09T01:37:00.002-08:00

Yukon Launch to Ray River

Well I have heard the last few years that the Pike fishing on the Ray and Dall Rivers is great... It is time to see if it lives up to the rumor mill. Having done the fly into Minto Flats for two days a couple few years back, the Dall had some living up to do. Doug and I made our pact to go check it out for a few days. So about 7:00pm after work on August 4th we left Fairbanks and headed north hauling my 16' tunnel flat bottomed Alweld with a 40 Hp Jet up to the state maintained launch into the Yukon River just downstream of the Dalton Highway / Yukon River bridge. We had tried to guesstimate our fuel needs and ended up taking 30 gallons of gas on the boat. By the time we launched into the Yukon, it was raining and just after 10:00 pm. Neither of us were too keen on motoring up in the rain since my boat is wide open to the elements so we booked it downstream for a couple miles to the confluence of the Ray River and the Yukon. With such a massive river we skirted the shoreline about a hundred or so feet off incase of motor problems

Dall River by our Camp

we stood a chance of getting to shore relatively quickly. Even worse if wind made waves swamped my boat I could gun it towards shore and not have far to swim! We set up a hasty camp on the downstream of the confluence in the rain (I didn't want to run up the Ray due to poor visibility and the possibility of sand bars). We noticed a lone bear track up our sand bar and several moose tracts. The Yukon is intimidating. Its not a slow moving monster of a river. There IS current and it moves right along. Definitely not a river to just launch into without some experience. At a mile across and sometimes many miles across, it acts like a lake with current. If the wind picks up valley, you are looking at white caps pushing three foot swells. Not to mention the amount of debris that often is found. from sticks to entire hundred foot trees. Anyway, that is my Yukon disclaimer!! When morning arrived, it was still raining but we walked around the corner to check out the Ray River Confluence with the fishing rods.

We spent about twenty minutes casting around the clear Ray waters and I only hooked into one pike which I lost (I did see him and he wasn't worth much of anything). We weren't in too much a mood to fish around since it was raining and we had a long night so we broke camp and skipped out on exploring the Ray River with the boat. We headed up past the launch and underthe dalton highway bridge. We buzzed up probably ten miles before my hands were straight up numb from the wind and rain so I pulled off the river and walked around a bit to warm up. After a good ten minutes, off we went and covered another ten miles up stream into some braids. It was coffee time. We had been running up stream for about an hour now. We pulled off again in a braid on a little sand bar and cooked up some eggs and side pork and sipped a cup of coffee. We had no idea exactly where we were. We didn't have a map but we knew if we stayed left for two braids, we would hit the Big Dall River and by Doug's account we were in the second braid so we were close. Sure enough, another ten minutes of running and we popped around the corner and saw the Dall River. We buzzed right in and as soon as we got up into the clear water the fishing began! We hooked into a decent pike over 30 inches in about 15 minutes of trolling up stream. The water was pretty high and people had told me not to bother with the Dall if the water was high. its best low and clear. But what the hell, we are already here, the fish are still here, its just a bit more water to fish. We fished all afternoon and hooked several more but it was pretty slow. We finally stopped and set up a camp several miles up into the Dall and cooked up some dinner and crashed. I was glad the rain had given up by about the time we had stopped for breakfast, it made the rest of the day enjoyable. I slept hard and woke up ready to catch some fish! We trolled all day back and forth exploring the east fork for a couple miles and then up the Dall further to the west fork. We landed one pike just under 40" and had a couple huge hits but missed them. Probably landed about 20 or so Pike. We settled in for another dinner and curled up in our sleeping bags for night two on the Dall. We awoke to rain again and with no signs of letting up we opted out of trolling around for the morning and just topped of the gas tank and hit the Yukon downstream back to the launch. The ride down was a lot smoother with less wind. We made good time as expected and before long we were enjoying coffee and breakfast at the Yukon River Lodge. All in all we caught far less than I was expecting but, like people told me, its probably magnitudes better with lower water. I'm a believer of the Dall River pike. I have zero doubts that there are 50 and even 60 inch pike in that river. I hope to go back for another round with better water levels. I did learn another valuable Dalton trick, cover your boat with a tarp or you'll have to spend a half hour with a pressure washer just to see the paint again!!

Overall, its about 25 miles up the Yukon and 25 back with some room to play in the Dall say 20 or so miles so plan for AT LEAST 70 miles worth of gas!

Week of Camping and play in the AK Part III

2011-08-08T23:49:00.000-08:00

July 27th-30th. We awoke at the Glaciers edge and eager to get the ice climbing gear on and head out so we went back up to where we stashed the gear to find that we had been visited during the night. Likely a smaller black bear but at any rate, it had put a couple holes in various things we had at the stash like Erin's jacket and my water bottle. Our food was still high and dry though. I was glad we had decided to camp down off the trail. Bears are lazy creatures of habit. We ate a quick breakfast and got the climbing gear situated and headed out onto Root Glacier for a day of climbing and hiking. We wondered a mile or so up on the ice, taking breaks here and there for some short, less than vertical climbing and prussik use/technique schooling. I definitely got fried between the sun and the reflection from the ice. I wish we had found some larger walls of ice to climb but I was satisfied we found something. Its probably better to get them on something they can climb rather than something that is difficult so I think it went well. We did look for some large bottomless blue pools but all we came up with was some small ones. I surely was not complaining since afterall, its AK and a nice sunny summer day is always welcome! Before long we had noticed the day was waning and it was time to start to head back down towards our camp. We settled in for some dinner and all found the sleeping bags quite comfortable for the second night down by the Glacier. I woke up real early to pee and stepped out to see that the clouds had lifted off the mountain tops and had shown us the summits. I woke up the rest of the crew to check it out. A quick, "wow thats pretty" *click of the camera and then back to bed they went. We got up the morning of the 28th and were in a bit of a discussion as to what we were going to do with today. During dinner the night before, Erin had managed to spill hot coffee onto her foot (don't ask me how) and she now had a huge blister on the side of her foot that needed draining every couple hours or so. rather discusting I might say. Anyway, we all wanted to go up the trail to the Kennicott Mine and check out the rocks. By the time we had gotten down so the Root Glacier access trail, near where the fork for the mine trail was, it was looking like we were going to be in a rush to head up to the mine in order to get out in time. We ended up bailing on the mine trail. It would have to wait for another time. We headed back into Kennicott and found the shuttlebus down to McCarthy were we checked out the little Potato Restaurant and then hit up the museum and walked the half mile back to the foot bridge. Sixty miles of dirt road later just as we were about to finish the drive out I came around the corner to find a small land slide just covering the road. The two options are to stop, grab the shovel out of the back and clear it or try to drive over it. worse case scenario is you have to get out and dig out the truck too! This slide was easy enough and I made it through with a puff of dust getting a thumbs up from the SUV stopped on the other side of it. So with that we were back in Chitina. We walked out to Salmon Point to see how

the dip-netting was going. I talked with a guy who was almost limited out in a few hours. I got all giddy and I wanted my salmon for the year so I made the crew check out the Copper River while I put my net in the water. Erin had to work the next morning so she took off but by two am, 22 Salmon were on the stringer. By now, John and Magdalena were sick of the Copper and tired so we went and cleaned up and crashed at the Fish and Game bunkhouse in Chitina. We didn't manage to get to sleep until nearly three am due to the cleaning and getting out of fishy clothes. seven am came all to soon with Erin's arrival at work booting us out of the Bunkhouse. We found ourselves no more than a block away at the Chitina Cafe ordering coffee and Reindeer sausage and eggs. It was Friday morning now and the week is winding down. Hitting the road yet again, we traveled to Valdez and stopped at Worthington Glacier and Bridal Veil along the way to check it out. A beautiful day, we couldn't complain. We walked along the docks and checked out the boats, ate a nice dinner, went across the bay to see the hatchery pinks returning to the creek and by evening we were driving back up into Thompson Pass. We parked at a pull out near the top of the pass and hiked in for fifteen minutes and found a nice little spot up on the hill above the road far enough we couldn't see or hear it. We enjoyed the last evening with nice views of a clear evening in Thompson Pass. Early Saturday we yet again hit the pavement and drove back to Chitina to grab the Salmon that I had left in the deep freezer the other day and then drove to Anchorage. I did manage to get pulled over for speeding but the Tropper let me go. I think he thought I was just tired since I was pulling the boat with dipnets in it and I looked like I had been camping for a week. I got a warning to slow down and get a soda or coffee if I needed it. Fair enough, I was tired, just not from dipnetting! We stopped at the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer but weren't intrigued enough to pay 10 dollars to see one so we just peeked over the fence and then headed up to Eklutna Lake for a little bit just to get out of the truck and walk. Skipped a few rocks and looked at a clouded out Bold and Bashful Peak. We headed into Anchorage and went up to the Flat Top parking area and Anchorage look out. It was a last ditch effort for a Denali viewing since I know you can catch a glimpse along the road on the way up but alas, it remained elusive. The view was nice enough, just not that far. It was time so I dropped my two old friends off at the airport and started to drive once more. I made it Honolulu Creek before I pulled off the road and crashed for a few hours. I managed to get back to Fairbanks by mid-morning on the 31st. Back to work on the 1st and then off to the Yukon River on the evening of the fourth. I had a few days to clean up the gear and re-organize... It was a good trip I thought. Fun to get out and about, I have seen most of that stuff before here and there but I always enjoy sharing my little world with people from back home. We didn't get to do the two things I REALLY wanted them to do. Denali Flight Seeing Trip and Valdez Salmon Shark Fishing but hey, just the more reason they have to come back I suppose.

Week of Camping and play in the AK Part II

2011-08-08T22:40:00.000-08:00

July 24th, 25th. We drove to Talkeetna in hopes of getting on a Denali flight tour but the weather once again had different plans and the planes were not flying. The lady said stick around for a day and hopefully there would be a break. Living up here, I knew better than to believe a word she said and we abandoned the Denali flight seeing tour and headed further north to Cantwell were we gassed up and hit the Denali Highway over to Tangle Lakes. Once at the lake we launched the boat and headed down to the outlet and found a nice camping spot, albeit, no where near level, but nice enough. Considering there were blueberries everywhere, we were pretty happy with it! We quite happily enjoy the first afternoon without any rain and hung out. Our first real break in nearly 36 hours. A cow moose come out onto the lake late evening to feed and we buzzed over in the boat to get a closer look. She wasn't very amused by our curiosity! After a few drinks and fresh Copper River Sockeye I caught a few days prior, we crashed for the night and again woke up in the rain. A quick buzz back to the boat ramp and soon we were on our way to the Tonsina River where my friend Erin had a cabin that we could shower up at. We stopped at Sourdough and since the weather was holding up we decided to toss the boat into the Gulkana River and buzz up river for a bit to check it out and shoot a couple rifles to play around. The little excursion was pretty uneventful other than you get to go under the pipeline as you go up near the launch and I did manage to smack a rock coming down but it wasn't too big a hit. The Gulkana is full of boulders so its pretty much guaranteed to scrap one or two unless you run that river constantly. After our two hour Gulkana River run, we finished off the drive and enjoyed a hot shower while we re-organize our gear for Kennicott ice climbing and camping. We met up with my friend Erin in Chitina at the Cafe and had a burger and then hit the road to McCarthy. We were a bit pressed for time since the last shuttle up to Kennicott was at 7:00pm but we made it. Got our gear hauled across the foot bridge and ready for shuttle bus with fifteen minutes to spare! The weather was pretty decent our here. I was glad we abandoned the Denali area or we would have still been stuck in the rain. The four of us piled our gear into the near shock-less shuttle bus and graciously took the ride up to Kennicott sparing us from the eight walk in (well worth the ten dollars). We

wasted no time in headed on up valley and before long we were at the fork for the Root Glacier access and Root Glacier trail. We took the trail and followed it up close to where Erie Mine was before stopping for the night. Probably a good three or four miles. With all the bear activity, it was decided that we would cook and stash our gear near the trail and then set up camp a couple hundred yards down the slope near the glacier. We cooked a feast of pineapple, red pepper, mushrooms, Sockeye Salmon, and fresh Prince William Sound

shrimp. We ate until absolutely stuff and then raised a bag in the nearest acceptable tree with all the food and settled down into the tent for the fourth night.

Week of Camping and play in the AK Part I

2011-08-08T19:47:00.000-08:00

I had a couple friends come up from the lower 48 for a week long excursion to see what the AK was all about during the summer. I had a fairly ambitious week planned and of course the weather changed some of that plan as we went but I thought we covered a fair amount of ground, picking areas with fewer tourists but still just as impressive. Anyway, here is the synopsis of a week of AK play in July. I should mention, Magdalena snapped all these pictures during their week up here. I'm just snagging some to put on here for show and tell.

July 23rd & 24th... Their plane landed in Anchorage at 10:30pm on Saturday night and after grabbing luggage, off we went. A quick hour drive later, we were re-organizing gear, popping open a beer, and parking the truck at the Crow Pass trail head. We wondered up the trail a mile and a half or so without any headlamps with decent visibility until we crossed tree line. Found a nice little relatively flat spot and set up camp for the night. After a day of flying, an hour of driving and another hour of hiking at night, it was time for a rest. morning arrived all to quickly and we staggered out of the tent and continued to wonder up the trail to the pass where we had a great view of Raven Glacier about 3500' . I had more planned for the day so the top of the pass is as far as we went on the Crow Pass trail system but it does go all the way through to Eagle River for a good weekend trip. We meandered back down to the camp site, packed up and went back to the Girdwood coffee shop at the bottom of the hill for a latte and to meet up with a friend of mine. With coffee in hand the four of us piled into the pick up and hit the Whittier tunnel. My two friends went out on a glacier cruise of Prince William Sound for the afternoon while Moriah and I attempted to hike a trail in the rain to find the elusive Horsetail Falls. The entire afternoon it rained on the two of us hiking and the two out glacier cruising which is on par for Whittier but still, would have been nice to have a bit of sun! After being entirely drenched for five hours hiking we met up with the cruisers and hit the tunnel out and settled down at Mooses Tooth with another friend Joshua for dinner. Afterwards we grabbed my little jet boat and began to head north. We tried to get up into Hatchers Pass for the night but the fog spoiled our plans with a thickness that limited the view to twenty feet. I found a pull off near tree line and we pitched the tent for the second night. It lightly rained on us all night long and by morning I was a little ticked that the weather hadn't been nicer and considering I was dip netting the Copper River in nearly ninety degree weather the week before, a little sun wasn't too much to ask. I had planned on driving over the Pass and coming out down the road from Talkeetna but I found no point in doing so when morning arrived and the fog had not lifted at all. We opted to make the drive back down the hill and around to Wasilla before heading north.

Oryx Hunting New Mexico

2011-01-27T03:20:00.000-09:00

Switching things up a bit with a hunting tag for Oryx, I eagerly left the January 3rd forty below temperatures of Alaska for the warm sunny days of south central New Mexico to an area bordering the famed White Sands Missile Range and National Park. The missile range itself grew famous for the Trinity Site which is where the first atomic bomb was tested by scientists working out of Los Alamos, New Mexico. An area boasting a uniqueness of terrain and history matched by no other.
93 Oryx bred from a herd originating in the Kalahari Desert of Africa were relocated to the 3200 square mile White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico over the course of eight years starting in 1969. Since then, the population has grown conservatively, to at least 3000 animals. Some additional historical information about the introduction can be viewed at http://www.hcn.org/issues/213/10797 . We had obtained an "off-range" permit which essentially means we had to find Oryx that had crossed the fence line for whatever reason. This is, however, an easy task to accomplish since after all, it is the desert and water rules. Oryx routinely cross under the fence line at night onto ranches to drink water from the cattle troughs set up nearby and either quietly return back to the range during the morning hours or bed down in the area. The trick is to find the spots where the oryx go under the fences and which water troughs they are hitting. The range is a large area, and perimeter hunting is a game of patience

Jan 4th. I arrived in Albuquerque during the mid-morning hours and we were quickly on the road to Tijeras to hook up the Trailer and then south to camp near Bingham, New Mexico. Having Set up camp and a couple hours left of daylight, we loaded into the truck and went to a drive down the perimeter road of WSMR and then off onto a ranch, crossing several Arroyos which were a sandy mess making four wheel drive a necessity. Only saw a single set of Oryx tracks but plenty of mule deer and Pronghorn antelope. Ate a nice steak dinner with a couple beers and finally crashed. Hunting officially starts in the morning.

Jan 5th. Up and about well before dawn, filling the Coffee thermos, getting some food together and warming up the truck (it was unusually cold for down in this area, below freezing, pushing close to single digits). We piled into the truck as dawn approached and started to quickly drive the perimeter fence line scoping the terrain in hopes that some Oryx had crossed in during the night. We must have covered twenty miles on the roads that weaved around the ranches to each cattle water trough and saw nothing but some large mule deer bucks and plenty a head of cattle. Eventually we meandered back to the trailer and cooked up some bacon and eggs before heading out again. With no fresh sign in this area, it was pretty evident, we were in the wrong spot. We hit the highway in the afternoon down the road to another ranch that borders WSMR. Access to the WSMR fence was nearly a 17 mile drive back on a dirt road but, we were pleased with the results. Tracks littered every water trough and the fence itself was partially torn on the bottom with heavily used Oryx trails in numerous places. We knew of this spot before hand since after all, it was the area my dad had shot a young Oryx on the last trip. We quietly drove around until dark scoping different crossings and water holes discussing the next mornings plan. Back at camp that night over a green chili Oryx burger (from the last one shot in the previous year) we were confident we were getting onto the Oryx and would see one the next day.

Jan 6th In the pre-dawn hours, we drove the dirt up to the fence crossings and set my dad down in the dark where we thought they would be coming back in the next couple hours while we circled around up on another road in attempt to push animals down to him. It wasn't long before I spotted an adult Oryx about 400 yards out making his way back towards the range. They are here. Its truly amazing how well they blend in and can disappear in a blink of an eye. By 8:30 in the morning, all was quiet and I slowly made my way back down to the fence line to hear about how he had shot at a nice Oryx when three came trotting down the path we had scoped. Unfortunately in the heat of the moment, moving animals, frigid fingers ... he had missed the shot. We had the right idea, we knew where the animals were going, where they were coming from, and most importantly when and where they would be the morning hours.

Three Oryx quickly making their way into the WSMR (if you can pick them out).

Jan 7th, 8th and 9th. We repeated the same thing the next morning but to no avail. We spooked the ones that were regularly crossing there and they moved on. It was a matter of waiting until they came back or another set of animals came over. Mid-morning on the 8th we packed up shop and headed back to Los Alamos. I spend a day and half with family while slowly repacking gear and getting some more groceries and stuff together. I was pretty determined to get back down promptly considering I flew all the way down here. Motivating my dad to do the same didn't take much effort although I'm quite confident he would have been just as pleased not having to sleep in a tent when temperatures were down to single digits at night and highs into the 50's. Such is life, it least it wasn't forty below!

Jan 10th We hit the road by mid-afternoon and met up with a friend of mine who joined in and the three of us headed back onto the ranch. We arrived with about an hour of light to spare and spent it scoping out the water troughs again. The Oryx were still drinking nightly, we just had to catch a good one on the right side of that silly fence!

Jan 11th, 12th and 13th. Three absolutely frustrating days of staring at Yucca's trying to find bedded down animals. Pretty well convinced at dawn, all the animals turn back into cactus. Oryx tracks 400 yards from camp fresh from overnight. Highly annoying! They have been hunted pretty strong so the animals have become quite used to coming in during the night hours and being gone by morning. My friend had to get back to Albuquerque so it was back to just my dad and I. The 12th ended much as it started, cold, dark, and no oryx while the 13th rolled through much like all the other days, checking water troughs, glassing for bedded down Oryx.

Jan 14th. Well we finally got what we wanted around 8:30 in the morning with 200 yard shot using a commemorative single-shot 1976 7mm magnum.

Finally after being patient and putting in a fair amount of time. You can hunt all you want but in the end, an off-range hunt for Oryx is all about waiting at the arbitrary line (fence) in the early morning hours for a straggler headed back to the range. It was an interesting hunt, I'm so used to wide open terrain in Alaska that it was difficult to confine myself to this side or that of a silly fence. It was nice to hang with my dad for week or so and I'm glad we were finally successful cause I won't lie, I was getting tired of staring at Yucca's through the binoculars. Of course--- I've already applied to go back though.

Hittin' Up Valdez for some Silvers

2010-09-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

Well after the quick trip up north, we heard the Silver's were hitting good in Valdez so we turned around and went south a day after getting back from the Sag River. It turned out to be a rumor, there were Silver's but not in the number I am used to. We did manage to get a dozen or so in 15-18 pound range and had a black bear come into camp which I couldn't shoot cause it was a day before the season opened.. Go figure! We spent two nights in Valdez and then meandered back half way and camped for a third night before finally pushing back into Fairbanks. Today is Moose opener so I'm sure we will be driving around half assed looking for an easy Bull but I'm not too worried seeing that I got a freezer full of salmon and caribou. As always, Valdez was a blast. Makes me wonder why I turned down the job offer there... Such is life I suppose, decisions, decisions. Maybe next time...

Sagavanirktok and Ivishak River Caribou

2010-09-01T11:57:00.002-08:00

After getting off of work, I went home and we spent a couple hours getting loaded up and filling gas cans and whatnot. Finally hitting the road shortly after seven in the evening, I was in for a long night of driving. It was after midnight before I even hit Atigun Pass. I came across some hunters near Toolik Lake who were having some truck problems, and by that I mean, their tire came flying off, severing three lugs and bending the other three. There was no way they were going to get a spare on. I gave one of them a ride back to their camp near the UAF research center at Toolik Lake and pressed on… What else can you do? Two hours after that, a thick fogged dawn arrived and we were still driving. We finally arrived at the boat launch site north of Pump Station Two only to find the water in the Sagavanirktok was so low that only came half way up the tires.
Launching the boat was an interesting task. I backed the truck completely into the water and we had to dry launch the boat by lifting the front up enough that the boat finally slid down into the water. It was a rough job and I will try to avoid ever having to do that again. I spoke with a couple guys at the launch who had been up there before and they gave me some beta which I found to be valuable. He told me that the launch is actually in a channel off the main Sag River and it was pretty hairy for a mile or so to get up and out into the main channel. He also mentioned that to hit the Ivishak just keep an eye on the bluff about eight miles up and then head into the left channels once close and then offered an additional word of advice about coming back down… “Don’t miss the channel on the left cause you’ll just miss the launch and keep on going. It is easy to miss because it’s a little channel and when you are running down, you are focused on staying with the main current”. I’m glad I talked with him! So here we were, twelve hours since we left Fairbanks, getting into our boat topped off with gear about to buzz up some arctic river I had never been on in dense fog with an earful of beta and no map… Sounds good to me.
I ran the boat smoothly five miles up-river going full throttle weaving through channels barely deep enough for the tunnel jet flat bottom, gritting my teeth every time I tap a rock underneath going 20 mph. I finally cut a corner too close and hit a large rock with the impeller guard and it severed three bolts knocking the guard down into the river and leaving us high and dry. We managed to pull the boat ashore and I begun the task of wading up and down the river trying to find the guard (we could still run the motor at this point but the next rock I hit, we would be floating back). After ten minutes I got lucky and found the guard near a boulder in the river and we discovered that of the six bolts that hold it on, three must have jiggled loose on the drive up and fallen out while the other three were severed in place. So that was a relief, we took three screws out of the floor decking and screwed them up into the aluminum putting the guard back on but entirely ruining the fit (what other choice did we have). So yay, we are up and running again, just don’t hit anymore rocks! I tried to get on step and noticed we were dragging a lot so I pulled off the river again and turned the guard around (had it on backwards) and that helped! We ran another ten miles up-river with no problems, weaving in and out of channels. I eventually hit the Ivishak River and darted left to head up and around the first corner I saw fifty caribou wading across. I run up on shore and grabbed the rifle, but they were already a couple hundred yards off and running. Definitely didn’t like the boat. I could have shot one of the two large bulls that were bringing up the rear but I passed on the shot. We continued up the Ivishak for roughly six or seven miles and finally decided there that we weren’t going to run up the river any father because we could see several hundred caribou on the surrounding hills. The caribou were here, why go further up-stream with an injured motor?
We set up camp pretty quick and my dad was ready to crash. He said if he heard a gun-shot then he would come out and help me but that he was going to stay in camp and sleep. That was fair, he was tired, I set off with my pack and rifle, and a hundred yards from camp, a small bull caribou popped up 50 feet in front of me all confused. He was by no means a trophy caribou, but heck, can you get any closer to camp? I shot him right there and my dad wondered over mumbling, “I just got into my sleeping bag”. Several hours later that small bou was hanging to dry in camp and my dad was snoring away. I decided to go up over the ridge and see if I can down a large bull. I wasn’t disappointed when I popped out over the bluff and saw well over a hundred caribou and several trophy bulls. I took my time and skirted around the group, flanking the bulls on the back side of a hill. By the time I got into shooting range, I was nearly a mile and a half from camp late evening. I shot the large bull and began the work of cleaning him up. I took my time and got all the meat packed but there was just no way I was going to carry all the meat plus the head and rack so I left it in the tundra and slowly made my way back to camp carrying the whole caribou strapped to my back. It was a long mile and by the time I curled up in my sleeping bag, we had two bull caribou hanging in camp on the first day. My dad awoke the next morning surprised to see another caribou but not energetic enough to walk out the mile and a half to get the rack. I wasn’t either. We broke camp and loaded up the two bulls into the boat and begun to head back to the truck by ten am after spending just one night on the Sag. There were so many caribou, I could have easily stalked and shot numerous trophy bulls that would have made any trophy hunter jealous like no other. the second bull I shot, would have done that jealous bit nicely and it was left in the field. what can you do, next time I'll bring it out!

I made a couple mistakes running down river, it is a lot harder to see. At one point I ended up in a channel that diverged from the main channel by nearly a quarter mile and then spread out so much that I got hung up trying to fly through, we spent a half hour dragging the boat down that channel until I could get back into the main channel. The second mistake was once we were near the launch, I ended up in the wrong channel again but I caught it pretty quick and was able to turn around and go back up and get into the right one. The final mistake was the worse and would've cost us the boat. There is a hairpin turn near the launch where you have to make a ninety degree turn in order to stay in the channel and not run aground. I unfortunately didn't see where the water was the deepest and cut the corner a little and hit a rock that forced the motor out of the water taking me off plane and unable to steer. I run straight into the river bank going almost full speed. We had just enough time to brace ourselves. the aft end of the boat sticking out up into the current was close to being pushed under by the current as our bow was up in the bank. We carefully maneuvered ourselves out of the boat and dug it out. and got it floating again and off we went. Smooth sailing the rest of the way. We loaded up and decided to start the drive south but to stop at Gailbraith Lake for the night and break up the drive. We found a herd of a dozen or so Muskox resting out in the sun along the Sag River and stopped to get some pictures and managed to stalk within about 25 yards or so. We spent the night at the lake and cooked up some beans with fresh diced caribou ribs and it was fantastic. Slept hard and finished the drive back to Fairbanks the next morning. All in all, we spent one night on the river, one at the lake (where I even managed to catch a couple smaller lake trout) and then back to town. A two night trip was quite a wham bam thank you mam trip for the arctic but it went well and I intend to do it again someday.

Pre-Trip: Jet boating the Sagavanirktok River up into the Ivishak River

2010-08-20T11:42:00.000-08:00

Well, I've slowly been gearing up to head up north once again. This time, I'm headed a little further than usual. The plan is to join the other Airboat hunters and launch into the Sag River just a couple miles downstream from the pump station off the Dalton Highway and then take the jet boat up the Sag, into the Ivishak River and out of the Dalton Corridor. Should be an intersting venture as per usual up there. Geared up for the long haul, taking six five gallon gas cans plus the 12 gallon boat tank which should split up to an extra 15 gallons for the truck to get back (otherwise I'd have to go another 40 or so miles further north to the gas station at Prudhoe Bay and then back -- an extra 80 miles by dirt road isn't all that appealing) and an extra 15 gallons for the 40 Hp Jet which would then total 27 Ga for the boat. I figure this should be more than enough for the 30 or so mile run up with some leeway to do some day trips. Hopefully we will have time on the way back to Launch into the Yukon River at the bridge and either run up the Yukon for a couple hours to reach the Dahl River and fish for some monster northern pike or perhaps even down river (although I'm not too keen on the idea of downriver running) to the Ray River for some Shee Fishing.

Getting geared up for the Dalton this time of year is really quite simple, spare tires and a bug suit. Be prepared for snow, sleet, fog, or 75 degrees. You never know what the weather will be. Been snowed on in July and suffered in near 80 degrees late August.

Our schedule is pretty open so It should be a relaxed week of heading up north on the Dalton once again.. Just got to wait until Wednesday the 25th.

Fishing Time

2010-08-19T10:39:00.000-08:00

Fall is arriving and the fishing for Alaska's best is starting to pick up. We nailed this huge Arctic Char yesterday out on the lake after twenty minutes of fishing. That late evening Pike fishing was stellar, we were sight casting pike as they rolled up in the weeds, some were pretty damn big, we landed this mid ranged pike, lost a few big ones when they dove down or cut our lines. My dad is up visiting from New Mexico and got roughly a three pound trout the day before... yeah, cooler weather a little breeze, some bigger fish.

Blueberries!

2010-07-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

Well it's quickly becoming the time of year where berries are everywhere. A friend and I decided to take full advantage of the blueberries and raspberries near the Chatinika River today for a couple hours and took home more than I was expected for a quick outing. Saw a moose calf, lost a pint of blood to mosquitos but it was a fun quick, tasty trip.

Moose Pee

2010-07-04T10:39:00.001-08:00

So yeah, I was stalking a moose the other week early in the morning and got a little more than I bargained for... I'll admit, I felt like a voyeur after this.

Upper Paradise Lake and Russian River

2010-07-01T16:56:00.000-08:00

Alright, last one from last summer... I'm going to attempt to stay up to date now... We hired a pilot to take us by Dehavilland from Moose Pass to Upper Paradise Lake near Seward for a long weekend where hiked, went fishing and generally relaxed. A neat place. Hiking is difficult due to the thick Alders and other undergrowth. We bushwhacked for two hours in the thicket until we got above tree line. After that, the hike was nice. Coming back down was another story as we found ourselves in salmon berries (tasted great)with steaming piles of bear crap. We didn't have much a choice except to keep on trudging down through the berries and alders until we got back to our boat and paddled back to the cabin. It was a nice little retreat up into the mountains. I'm sure I'll do something similar again. Afterwards we hit up the Russian River to see if we could find some Grizzly bears. It didn't disappoint!

McCarthy/Kennicott and Valdez

2010-07-01T16:31:00.000-08:00

Well, here is yet another one that I'm behind on putting up... I'm about up to date I think with the bigger/more fun AK trips at least (aside from one more). Kennicott/McCarthy was on tap for this trip and a little Valdez Silver Salmon fishing to finish it off. A friend and I drove the Denali Highway from Anchorage to McCarthy and camped along the road. Spent the day hiking out at Root Glacier and exploring Kennicott. I've gone there several times now, I think I like it.. Maybe not the hippy pot smoking town of McCarthy, but Kennicott... The mine is just that, a mine. However, the area is awesome to go play around in and during the summer when all the tourists flock to Denali, the Wrangell St. Elias area is not only better than Denali, you don't have to fight the crowds. Its a well kept secret in the state during the summer months for sure.. Maybe it is just the 60 mile dirt road that keeps a lot of them out...

The stairwell glaicer there around the corner from the Kennicott Mine is the largest in the world and it doesn't dissapoint! Also one of the more amusing parts to walking on glaciers is the blue pools that are crystal clear. You can look probably a hundred feet down and still see no bottom. The hike to the actual mines is several hours long so most are content just walking to the glacier which is only about a half mile. I could spend weeks hiking up those valleys, high up into the mountains and glaciers... its a once a year area for me I think.

After hiking around, we hit the SIlver's off of Alison Point in Valdez. We hooked several nice Salmon right off the bat so that was fun. A foggy day in Valdez.. go figure!

Hitting The Snow

2010-07-01T15:58:00.000-08:00

Yet another older trip, at least this one was from February of this year! A co-worker and I took off to the mountains near the Gulkana Glacier for a day of riding. It was a stunning day, crystal clear. We must have gone thirty or so miles up into the mountains, eventually leaving the other snow mobile tracks behind we found fresh powder waist deep. Couldn't beat the scenery and we played around the whole day going from one valley over the mountains to the next, burying ourselves in powder and sometimes getting some air going off of cornices on the down side. Super fun.

Minto Flats

2010-07-01T15:41:00.000-08:00

Here is another catch up trip. A couple friends and I had flown from Fairbanks to Minto Flats for a weekend of pike fishing. Probably one of the most enjoyable fishing trips in a long time. The average pike we hooked was about 2 feet and we hooked into several that were much larger. Nearly one in three casts would have a pike on. I couldn't even tell you how many we hooked but, my arms were sore from reeling when we left! A little pricey to get there but, well worth it if the fishing is good! We stayed in a wall tent along a main channel and fished the heavy weeds for the big pike and then casted up and down the main channel as well but the pike there seemed to be the smaller ones. I was amazed at how many pike were in the water and even more curious to how many small critters actually manage to swim across the channel without being devoured. Those fish mangled every single thing we plopped into the water.

Dalton Highway

2010-07-01T15:10:00.001-08:00

Here's a little catch up on a trip that happened last year but, I just never got around to getting some pictures up from it. I ended up driving the Dalton Highway on two occasions last year. Definitely a remote portion of the state with bugs so bad in the summer time that you just start humming the song of mosquitos after a while. A road where one definitely needs a couple extra spare tires and a good engine. 440 miles of dirt road and any sort of mechanical help is few and far between. As far as I'm concerned, it is top tier on the list of places I like to escape to in the AK. Few people and remote! I spent a total of 10 days up north, fishing and whatnot. I hunted Dall Sheep in 2004 up here as well. The caribou are seasonal visitors along the Dalton and are quite hit or miss but when they are there, they are there in the thousands. Sheep are plentiful but, the 5 miles corridor for rifles is pretty rough on foot but, we managed. An awesome road. Atigun pass is spectacular and the Lake Trout in Gailbraith Lake are hungry!

2010 Copper River Fishing

2010-06-24T05:29:00.000-08:00

Well the 2010 Salmon is getting off to a decent start with a trip to the Copper River netting 48 salmon with 5 being kings. A couple fun trips ahead in the weeks to come... Looking up! The River was the lowest I've ever seen and fishing was slow but we did alright. Three days after returning to Fairbanks and having chartered down into the canyon, it was decided to go back down to the Copper for round two and some hiking out at Kennicott. I didn't bother going down into the canyon on this trip and went out to Salmon Point instead. Ironically, the water was worse at Salmon Point than the notoriously rough water in the canyon. Once it stopped raining and the water came up some, the fishing picked up and I ended up with 27 additional Sockeye to take home. With the permit filled, and rainy weather discouraging our hiking plans in Kennicott (which just made it entirely a fishing trip to Erin's discontent), I ended up heading back into Fairbanks. The hiking part was a bust but hey, we got fish. Enjoyed a few days around the river. We stopped at Liberty Falls and took a hike up to the water falls. Nothing spectacular but, definitely a nice little area. Erin's dad smoked some salmon up on Willow branches and lemon pepper and I enjoyed munching on it the during the ride home!

This is a quick little video of the scenery at Salmon Point including the Copper River which is enormous at 60,000 - 360,000 cubic feet per second depending on weather.

Another little video of the Charter Jet boat ride down in the canyon on the Copper River.

About time Erin gets a fish.

Tuttu in the Tundra

2008-09-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

I went to go visit Jenny in the bush oasis of Atqasuk for a little R&R with some fishing and hunting on the side and ended up completing what is essentially an arctic circuit tour visiting several Eskimo/Inupiaq towns and villages including Prudhoe Bay/Deadhorse, Barrow, Atqasuk, Point Lay, and Wainwright. After arriving in Atqasuk via flights through Deadhorse and Barrow, I met up with the plane greater (Mel) who gave me a lift to Jen's Apartment where I unpacked the groceries I brought in and took a nap. A few hours later Jen came home and we went out for a walk on the tundra. This was of course not just the two of us. About ten children followed us for nearly an hour and half, talking and asking questions. "Is Jen your girlfriend"? "Who is your father"? "Do you have a gun"? "Whats your favorite Honda"? It went on and on until eventually I was completely frustrated and just wanted to go back to the apartment. We planned on getting up early the next morning and go up the bank of the Meade River to do some fishing all the while hoping that if we left early enough in the morning, the village children will still be sleeping and not follow us. It worked perfectly, the village was quiet and we bucked into a stiff wind for several miles until we got up to where a small creek fed into the Meade River. The Grayling weren't biting much (we only got a couple hits) and it was likely in the mid-thirties with good twenty mph wind so we were cold and decided to keep moving. Walking further away from the river and out into open tundra I can easily see how one can get lost. There are no vantage points, there is no sun direction, everything looks the same. We hadn't walked but a mile from the creek until we spotted three caribou (tuttu in inupiaq) off in the distance. We closed some ground and Jen leashed up her dog and I went ahead with the .300 Short Magnum. I had come prepared incase we saw some caribou but this was by no means a hunting trip, I had even left my camo back in Fairbanks. These caribou just so happened to wonder within a couple miles of town and I wasn't going to pass up some free easy meat. We wanted meat for the freezer and I didn't really want to deal with a hide and rack from a bull in the middle of the tundra anyway. I sat for a good five minutes watching and waiting for a shot. I wanted to make sure I shot the cow that wasn't weaning a calf. Eventually a shot was available at about a 100 yards at the cow (Kulavak in Inupiaq) and I was confident that the calf belonged to the other cow which worked out well since the mother was the smaller cow. She promptly fell cushioned by the sponge like tundra. It took us an hour to gut, skin and put the meat into my pack. Meanwhile, her dog enjoyed running across the tundra trying to catch the other caribou which were just casually staying away from him. We carried the meat back to town where I do believe some of the kids were surprised two white people walked out on the tundra and took a caribou (white people and no ATV's = no caribou in the bush). we spent a couple hours cleaning the meat up and packing it into the freezer before we decided to try our hands at fishing again. This just was not they day for Grayling. We got nothing. The next day we left early again and went for a long walk out on the tundra weaving our way along the frost heaves and ATV trails that led to lush hunting grounds. This was our day, spent walking outside and talking a nap afterwards. We repeated this again the next day (by now Jen was complaining about hiking) covering even more ground with about 14 miles across the tundra. My vacation time dwindled and I hopped aboard a Cessna Grand Caravan and left just to land in another village an hour later (Point Lay) I seriously do not understand living in Point Lay. There is literally nothing here but a small whaling and seal industry and a few caribou here and there. The picture you see is the bustling town of Point. Lay / Camp Culley Area. Not much to miss. We left shortly after landing and went to Wainwright where I didn't even leave the runway. I got off the plane took a piss on the runway and got back on. Eventually we took off again we flew about 1000' along the coast of the arctic ocean until we reached Barrow and within an hour and a half I was back in Fairbanks. I had apparently missed a shooting of a Polar Bear in the village of Atqasuk by about a week. The bear had come inland towards the village and they were convinced it was not going to leave (the dumpsters have no lids and have plenty of entrails and hides from caribou) so one of the villagers had shot it twelve times with a 25.06 rifle which is sad to me. Not that they shot a bear but, rather they choose a rifle that was inadequate for the job of taking a large animal. A 25.06 is perfect for little caribou but not a 1500lb bear. The Arctic bush communities amaze me but at the same time, I can do nothing but shutter. I truly enjoyed the trip but I know for certain, that I would not want to experience a long dark, cold winter in the arctic bush. A place where -50 to -60 degree weather sets in and the sun does not rise for 60-70 days. A place where rabid foxes rule. Hell, even the Caribou know that you have to leave during the harsh winters. Uhm, so yeah, best of luck to all of those who stick out a winter in the arctic bush. I surely tip my hat to you and your resilience to cope survive and continue to live where nature has surely meant
for seasonal occupation. I had to add this last picture in here for two reasons. First, its absolutely halarious. Second, it encapsulates bush mentality. A picture of a plane in Point Hope. The story behind this plane is that many years ago it broke down and the pilot and crew had to leave it on the runway at Point Hope until they could return with a mechanic and the parts to fix it. When they did, the villagers had already dismantled the plane and somehow managed to move the frame into the town where it still sits today. This is bush mentality, you left it, now its mine. Ownership is not paperwork, it is possession.

Copper River Dipnetting and Fish Wheeling

2008-08-01T10:06:00.000-08:00

This year has been an odd one when it comes to Salmon fishing. The runs were late, the runs were small, the rivers were flood stage, the rivers were low. In essence there just wasn't any "normal" fishing. However, the Silver Salmon season is beginning and is looking strong. The annual dipnetting trip to the Kenai/Kasilof Rivers was abandoned last year in part due to my move to Fairbanks. Long story short, in 2007, I switched dipnetting rivers and began to work the Copper river for my winter supply of salmon. The Copper River is different. Swifft silt laden mirky water with bizzare unpredictable current changes. If you fall in the Copper River, you are NOT in a good position. People die in this river, people disappear. Luckily the majority of the people who go to the Copper for their salmon, go with harnesses and rope and are vigilant by tying themselves off to a tree or the nearest boulder to ensure that if they get a 50+ pound King Salmon or slip on the rocks that they won't get sucked under. I really couldn't emphasize enough, the danger of this river. Entire trees can come shooting up from the depths just to disappear down into the current seconds later. Dipnetting is an Alaska resident gig and is simple. Hanging 20 foot or more poles off the rocks into eddies, the fish simply swim into your net and you lift them out of the water. The Copper is huge but, the fish use the eddies to rest so you can get numerous salmon. Sometimes three or four sockeye at a time will swim into the net. In 2007, my friend Josh, his cousin Ashton, and myself went down to the Copper river and we managed to net about 75 Sockeye in a single day. With that said, the fishing this year has be strange. Without a boat, people have been doing overall, poorly. The high waters have moved the salmon out to the middle of the river leaving dipnetting a slow business and some people have dipnetted all weekend for four fish! Yes, I even spent a whole weekend for four fish. I decided I had to turn my attention to another means of getting salmon. My friend Erin, knew someone who had a fish wheel and even in high water we were able to get 51 Salmon in the wheel and I dipnetted for an afternoon and added ten more to that. The river was so high due to a very large amount of rain that we even had to wade out into the river up to our knees to even get on the ramp that lead out to the fish wheel. Me and Jen left the Copper river with 61 Sockeye salmon this year which amounted to about 225lbs of filet. I surely am thankful to Erin this year for hooking us up with a wheel, othewise it was starting to look pretty bleak. Thats the nice thing about a fish wheel, on a good night, you can get up to a hundred salmon but, even when its slow to the point where you get a single salmon per hour, over the course 48 hours, you still have plenty of fish to filet. While 61 was well under my alloted amount of salmon on my permit (I'm allowed 200 salmon on the Copper River) it was well worth a little sweat and a long drive. As of July 28th over 700,000 Salmon have passed the sonar operated by fish and game, and are currently working their way up the Copper River.

Kodiak Brown Bear

2008-05-01T17:58:00.000-08:00

Bound for Afognak Island in the Kodiak Archipelago: April 16th 2008 (Day 0)
Having flown into Anchorage on the evening of the 16th (a day earlier than was originally planned--It got pushed up a day in due to excitement and fear of getting fogged in at Kodiak) and spending the night at Josh Brown’s apartment, I arrived in Kodiak at 7:00am on the 17th. Jacob Gondek came and picked me up in the dull orange State of Alaska, Parks and Recreation truck (he works for Parks as a civil engineer) and we went to the little hotel by the small boat docks where dozens of commercial halibut boats were moored up to drop off my gear and sort through our stuff for a bit. Shortly we were off and out around town in the Orange pickup making a good half dozen stops at various scanty sporting stores and likely the smallest Wal-Mart ever created trying to get last minute items. With our gloves, stove fuel, fishing lures, bear tag, and of course, bacon & eggs we loaded up on our last greasy fast food meal at McDonalds and drove out to the edge of town where we sat at the Parks and Recreation cabin for a couple hours just letting everything soak in. We even took a good mile and half walk up in the woods just to get out and about and kill a little time. Our flight time was approaching so we headed back to the hotel to grab our bags and I managed to drop the one beer I had packed for the hunt in the parking lot heaving my fifty pound pack into the truck on our way to Andrew Airways (the charter service we had hired to drop us off). We laughed it off as a bad luck to start an adventure and yet neither one of us cared. In two hours we would be on our own until someone flew in some eleven nights later to pick us up. We loaded up the plane and were air-born. It was only then we started to talk with our pilot in the headsets about where we specifically wanted to go. The microphones cut in and out but we managed to chit chat a bit and decided on Paramanof or Malina Bay on Afognak Island. About thirty minutes later we were buzzing low over the valley floor scanning the snow for bear tracks. This valley was littered in track. They were here. Jacob and I wasted no time in saying, “drop us off here”. The pilot buzzed the bay and creek turning in tight circles a few hundred feet off the ground finding a long enough track of water that was ice free to land on, the low tide didn’t make this effort any easier. He landed and we taxied up to shore, spun the plane around and we threw our gear on the softball sized gravel beach. The pilot wasted no time leaving us on a small outcrop of forested land on the beach to realize what we just got ourselves into. We just looked at each other. Whew! We are here and there was no one else. It is an odd feeling to be alone standing there watching your plane fly away, leaving you somewhere you’ve never been with nothing but what you stuff into your bag. It is bad enough to be out in the woods in a bad storm or if you get hurt but, your hunting partner can always manage to get back to the truck or find someone to help. This wasn’t the case here because we were officially stuck on an island surrounded by the World’s largest and most concentrated bear population with no satellite phone (which we would later regret not having but, we had blown it off by saying that hunters didn’t used to have them, so we don’t need one). The first order of business was to load the guns. The Browning .375 H&H Magnum with three in the clip and one in the chamber (this was to be the primary hunting rifle), the Marlin 45.70 four in and one in the chamber (the close encounter rifle), and the Smith & Wesson .44 six shot Magnum strapped to my belt (a last resort). We walked around a bit and found a decent camp site with good vantage of three sides, looking up and down the beach on both sides and across the bay. We spent several hours getting camp set up, gear situated, day packs ready for the next day, and our bear fence up and running (the fence is pretty much a joke, two D-cell batteries hooked up in a series attached to a wire that you string around your tent).With camp up and running and a couple hours of daylight left, we walked a mile up the beach and around the first bend in the creek just scoping out the terrain before returning to the trusty old North Face tent I’ve had since my dad bought it for me in high school. When I think about what that poor little tent has seen and been through over the years, I’m always impressed that it manages to fight off another gust of wind or snowy night without collapsing into a pile of weathered fabric completely spent. It was surely a chilly night under clear skies and a breeze off the mountain tops dropped the temperatures down into the teens.
The Hunt; Kodiak Brown Bear: April 18th 2008 (Day 1)
We woke early on the 18th eager to find bear and learn the terrain. I cooked up some bacon and eggs on the MSR stove and we were off, carrying about twenty pound packs excluding our guns. Walking the beach for the first mile at low tide, we spotted numerous deer feeding on the seaweed. Eventually the tidal flat gave way to meandering creek with a heavily used game trail about twenty yards off up in the trees. One goes from a beautiful sunny day to a dark and dreary world with trees covered in moss and little light finding its way to the ground. We stepped on iced over bear tracks along the creek for about two miles until it gave way to a series of interconnected meadows (which we later found out, were actually ponds/lakes) . We found large bear track working the tree line here and were glad to step out into the sun again for a while before heading back into trees for another couple miles further weaving in and out of the trees into open “meadows” and back into the dark mossy woods. We stopped and had a little lunch and decided that since it was our first day out, we didn’t want to have to make the walk back in the dark (a bit spooky even carrying three loaded large caliber guns). We returned to our tent about an hour before dark and had dinner. There wasn’t much talk, we were both excited about having seen so much bear activity up creek and were confident that we were not too early we had previously wondered prior to flying in if the bears would be out of their dens by now. Crashing quickly, Jacob was snoring ever before I had finished winding the day down in my head. I’ll tell you, it is hard to sit and try to listen to the soft beeping of our bear fence telling us it is still working over his snoring. I was tired, we had hiked at least a ten miles and some of it was falling through to our knees and occasionally thigh deep in snow.
April 19th and 20th 2008 (Day 2 and 3)
These two days were long hikes, leading up the creek and into the surrounding hills, trudging up softening spring snow, getting wet, and covering a lot of ground. We had conflicting beta from two credible people who have hunted/work here. One, a fish and game officer who said that moving around wouldn’t disturb the bears so it wasn’t a big deal (bears have one of the best noses in the animal kingdom, up to a hundred times better than Blood Hound) while the other, a guide, said that the best way is to just get in and sit tight letting the bears move around offering a shot. Having covered thirty miles on foot thus far we had been eating well into our provisions (more than we should have been). It was decided that we would have to be more careful with food so we started splitting meals into two rather each of us getting our own Mountain House meal. We glazed the hillsides and valley bottom from high and low. We walked and walked. Sneaking up on a bear was virtually out of the question, the cracking snow and thick forest did not yield for a silent walk. Our hopes were that the creek would cover our noise and I think it largely did. We spooked numerous deer, sometimes popping up less than fifty feet in front of us so I wasn’t too afraid of spooking bears away. We even managed to come up on a jet black fox a mere thirty feet way. We’ve seen a different fox nearly every day. A fox rarely ever stops moving, natures natural speed addict. We’ve seen the same half red half gray fox come out by our camp every evening and dig for clams at low tide while the deer grazed a hundred yards off. Hopping and digging frantically as the clams try to dig down (he was essentially our camp fox and by the end of our trip we got within maybe twenty feet of him even though he had seen us) he would leave the tidal flats pock marked with shin deep holes within a couple hours. Everywhere we went, it was but ten or fifteen minutes before we would see another bear track. They were here and they were working the area hard. I’ve got Devils’ Club thorns all in my hands and forearms. The forest is lined thick with them, especially along the creek. We decided to abandon the creek system for a day and look the other direction. I was having a blast seeing all the wildlife. We must have been seen over fifty deer by now, at least three different foxes and close up too which is unusual. These Island animals just were not very afraid of people. Given, fox are naturally spooky and skiddish, we were still getting closer than normal by a long shot. As day three wound down we meandered back to camp after our third day in a row of over ten miles on foot.
April 21st 2008 (Day 4)
We went high this morning, up onto the hillside trying to gain vantage of the valley floor but, you couldn’t see into the trees so it was nearly useless other than to make us heave through the snow and silently bitch to ourselves. We were getting frustrated by now with the lack of bear sightings. The tracks are just teasing us. I made a cup of coffee and sat in a pile of budding willows up on the hill and dozed off while Jacob went up a bit higher to climb a tree and take a look. I awoke fifteen minutes later to him plodding back down falling waist deep in snow every other step. We wanted off the damn snow (once the morning sun hit it for more than an hour, we would start falling through the crusted top to our waists making us wet and crabby) so we snaked our way back down into the thick undergrowth of the forest and back to camp for lunch all pissed and frustrated. A little food gave us some energy and we walked the beach for a couple miles in the opposite direction of the creek with a stiff tail wind and incoming tide. Sitting to glaze the hillside we could see what we believed to be den areas way up on the mountainside. The heavy tracks damn near blazing straight down with an occasional zigzag as if a bear had caught a scent and took a couple steps off course to get a better whiff before returning to his direct lumbering path toward the beach. We walked a few hundred yards into brush and worked the edge of the hillside and forest where we had a good view up into the willows. It wasn’t long before, even here, we were finding huge bear tracks. A lot of times you see bear track on smaller deer and elk trails but we found, actual bear paths padded into the ground. Bizarre, it was the first time I had ever seen anything like it. These animals, when adults range from 1000-1500 lbs and can really beat a path. Each step was nearly a yard and a half. It was really neat to see. The path hadn’t been used in a couple days at least due to the ice built up, but had been used this spring because the snow has been packed in hard. We continued on, eventually ending up back at camp late in the evening. Aggravated, we sat by our tree with a small camp fire nestled between us and in a full of bitch festival, we decided that we were doing something wrong. Perhaps we were moving around too much and just kept missing the bears or maybe our scent had spooked them out of the valley. The strategy changed and tomorrow we would be breaking out the spotting scope and staying close to camp just glazing the mountain sides. If we spot a good bear we can actively hunt it, as of now, we have just been walking and carrying our scent all over the valley. It was time to say goodbye to the fish and game biologist advice and start listening to the guide who hunts for a living. Jacob went down at low tide just before dark to set up the tripod and look for activity in the willows up high. I joined with the binoculars but looking across the bay. I said to him, “Well do you notice something strange over here? It is low tide there is not a single deer or fox out in the bay grazing or digging clams and it is nearly night fall”. We talked about it briefly and it was unanimous, there had to be a bear moving through that area keeping the deer pinned down in hiding and making the fox too weary to venture out into the open. We sat and watched until it was dark but saw nothing. We had talked about that a couple days earlier, with the amount of deer that we have been seeing that we should really pay attention when we stop seeing deer. There had to be a bear in our neighborhood. We were surely excited by that prospect but utterly wiped out from the first four days. We turned on our bear fence (it at least makes you sleep a little better) and got nestled into our sleeping bags. It looked like another chilly night. We had been completely blessed with great weather thus far and would gladly deal with a chilly night over infamous Kodiak rain or snow. We were exhausted with the fourth day said and done pushing a total of forty-five miles on foot.
April 22nd 2008 (Day 5)
The plan was to get out of bed pre-dawn and make breakfast and be set up for glazing by dawn but I kept hitting snooze on my alarm, the last four days were surely catching up with me, and it was a cold morning. About an hour after the first hint of day, Jacob decided it was time and got out of the tent and went down to the beach about fifty yards away to set up the tripod and spotting scope. I managed to move about ten minutes later except I went directly to the trusty MSR stove to boil up some creek water for the last of my coffee. I was dreading this. It looked like plenty of coffee but, it only last me five days and now I’m going to be out of my two favorite things while camping, bacon and egg breakfasts and instant coffee. With my last cup in hand I walked the thirty yards or so to the other end of our little spit to look across the bay opposite of what Jacob was spotting. I took a few sips and noticed the tide was going out and saw fresh sheets of ice slowly creaking along the shore, a few sea otters were clanging clams together making a racket, but notably, still no deer grazing across the bay nearly a quarter mile away. I took a few more sips and meandered back over to the bank overlooking Jacob and saw him still gazing through the spotting scope. I didn’t even say anything. We have spent the last sixty some hours next to each other, I didn’t mind having my coffee before wondering down the embankment (about a five foot drop). I retreated back over to the other side and enjoyed the first couple beams of light as the sun popped up over the mountains into Paramanof Bay. Nearly through my last cup of coffee I noticed something in the bay about half way across. It was dead silent now except the huffing, I took a double, then a third look. Sure as shit, it was a massive bear head sticking out of the water. He was swimming directly at me about four hundred yards out and moving pretty fast. I figured he was swimming and he was past half way so he wasn’t going to turn around. I yelled out to Jacob and trotted over because he was on the beach only about seventy-five yards from where this bear was going to hit land and last I saw, he was looking through a scope in the opposite direction! I looked down at him and saw that he had taken up position behind a large rock on the beach and had his rifle ready. He had heard, the bear puffing in the quiet morning and had spotted him. Jacob yelled at me to get my rifle. Are you serious? I thought, the bear is swimming, I’ve got time to go brush my teeth after my coffee but, the urgency in his voice spooked me. I dropped my last half of cup of coffee right where I stood and grabbed the lever-action Marlin 45.70 cocking the hammer as I ran back over to where I was (to the left is the bay the bear was swimming across).This was probably a bad idea because the bear had heard all the commotion and yelling between the two of us. He knew we were there and would probably make a direct run for cover which put me between him and the forest. Nonetheless, I pointed my rifle out and popped my head around the last tree on the embankment. It’s only twenty yards from here to the water. I looked out and didn’t see the bear then, I looked down. The bear was half way out of the water already and he was looking straight at me. He was swimming a lot faster than it looked when he was halfway across the bay. I was glad I had the lever-action on me because I could shoot twice as fast with the Marlin than I could the Browning Jacob had on him. I had remembered numerous conversations with Jacob and him saying he wasn’t going to shoot unless the bear was at least eight feet. All that ran through my head was that I was in a bad position and regardless if he fired or not, I might just have to. A split second decision had me taking three huge steps back to the next tree so I would have a clear shot no matter where he stepped up that embankment (it didn’t really matter because he was going to step up on the embankment with the most direct path he can take which would be three steps in front of me). As I took my last step back, Jacob opened up on him with the .375 H&H Magnum perfectly broadside at seventy-five yards. The bear hadn’t even taken three steps out of the water before Jacob saw that was indeed, a large boar (bears, like most animals look a lot smaller when wet. It’s a good rule of thumb that if the bear looks like a decent sized bear wet, he is probably in actually a big bear). He fired consecutively, one after another, four rounds in a matter of seconds which isn’t too shabby for an A-bolt rifle. All of which had this thick bone crushing thud, the sound every hunter knows when his bullet lands home. Great! My bad position was now worse, first I was in the way of a spooked Brown bear and cover but now, I was in the way of a spooked wounded Brown bear and cover. A couple seconds passed and he didn’t pop up those last five feet. I stepped up to the edge of the embankment ready to unleash five additional rounds. I figured he was either down or running down the beach instead of up into the trees because he would have plowed over me by now. I looked down and less than three bear strides from the embankment lay a nine foot Kodiak Brown bear that hadn’t gone ten feet from where Jacob’s first shot was fired. He was still alive and I knew that Jacob had to reload. My rifle was shouldered and finger on the trigger pointed directly at his shoulder (the Marlin has awesome bone crushing power, and if a bear, wounded or not, charges, never aim for the heart or head because the skull is thick and will likely deflect the bullet and even with lethal heart shot, the bear may have thirty seconds to move which is more than enough to tear a person apart). I took a couple precarious steps down the embankment without blinking or looking where my feet where going and circled around in front of him about ten feet away. I was going to put another round right into his heart to finish him off because I hate to see a wounded animal. His thousand pound or so body clenched up and seized as he took one last breathe while I stood there ten feet away. A final round in the heart wasn’t needed, that was his last breathe and he died. From the moment Jacob opened fire to me standing in front of this bear was less than thirty seconds yet it felt like twenty minutes. Every step was calculated subconsciously and split second. I heard Jacob yelling from up on the embankment. He had apparently forgotten to put in his ear plugs and could hardly hear and having retreated from the open beach to reload. He didn’t hear me or see yell that he was down. Ten seconds past and then Jacob showed up exactly where I had been standing on the embankment. I have no doubt that I can recall probably on a dozen or so occasions where I’ve been told to never approach a wounded bear. I did so without even flinching, in a very pro-active manner. Kind of frightening afterwards thinking about it because at the time, I just did it, and I did it swiftly, I wasn’t going to let him get away. I think this stems from my Brooks Range Dall Sheep incident a few years back but, that’s an entirely different story. We stood here for a few minutes just gathering what had just happened and then we both went back up to camp. We were going to back and sit down for breakfast and then go back down and do what needed to be done. However, we were both too excited for food and I had already spilled the last half a cup of coffee I had. So we got out my skinning knives and gloves and went to work. We hadn’t been skinning for twenty minutes when an Ermine came down out of the forest and laid in the grass five feet away to bask in the sun patiently waiting for a scrap or two. Jacob threw him a five pound piece of meat and he promptly dragged it back up the embankment and disappeared. We spent all day just casually skinning and fleshing the hide and skull. We were after all, a thirty second walk from our tent. We stopped and ate lunch on the rocky beach. Our only rush was to have this said and done in under about ten hours when the tide would have gone all the way out and returned to almost cover the bear. We enjoyed the sun on a beautiful spring Kodiak day. We barely moved from camp today but by the time we had the hide and skull wrapped up and salted for the day we were pretty beat. We figured, hey we get five extra days to just go explore the island and have fun screwing around and hiking. Making a nice fire, I busted out two shooters of Crown Royal and a couple Backwoods cigars to celebrate. Jacob has two shooters of Crown as well courtesy of Joshua Brown so we actually had a decent buzz going and were yapping warm by the camp fire about girls, family and the day’s events for a couple of hours before wiped out we crashed even though we seriously considered moving our camp away from the carcass on the beach so close. However, in the end, we didn’t get past talking about it. Both of shrugged it off and said tomorrow. Little did we realize or would we have cared to know that our great weather streak was beginning to end and our exploration time was limited and even our plane wouldn’t arrive on the day it was supposed to.

April 23rd, 24th and 25th 2008 (Day 6, 7, 8)
We spent day six at camp getting the bear hide laid out to dry and salted heavily (we had brought fifty pounds in on the De Havilland). Jake spent a good deal of time getting the last few bones out of the claws, splitting the nose and lips so that they would dry. When you are in the woods for upwards of a week after obtaining a hide, it becomes tedious work to keep it from going bad. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon moving camp and the electric fence about a hundred yards further away from the carcass. We have had a hard five first days so we took a couple to relax and get some energy back. We took mid-day naps up in the sun on the grass and just absorbed Afognak Island. The wind would pick up early in the afternoon and last until six or seven in the evening before it died off. The wind was bitter cold of the snowy mountains and you can go from just wearing a T-shirt to full on coat in minutes. We took a couple walks up the river a mile or so and looked at deer and spooked a couple more foxes and even a Marten late in the evening. The fox and bald eagles were having a field day with the carcass and the racket was overwhelming. Sometimes upwards of a couple dozen eagles would be swarming the bear and we would eventually get interested and sneak over and try to get a good picture. I got pretty darn close to some of the eagles and managed to even take this picture on macro settings on my camera. We tried crafting fishing poles from sticks but didn’t hook into any fish because it was windy and we couldn’t cast more than three feet out with our light weight lures. We had even dug clams by this point determined to have a nice big meal but, after boiling them, they surely did not look appetizing so we decided to leave the clam eating to the foxes and bears. We saw lots of deer and essentially hung out. Our energy was low since we had cut back on food and were still exhausted from nearly fifty miles on foot and two full days of working on the bear and hide. I’m not sure who did it but, I’ve narrowed it down to three culprits. It was an Ermine, Marten or Fox that grabbed my frying pan from camp and wondered off with it into the woods. So when we were bored we would look around the hill side for my MIA frying pan. Jacob eventually found it nestled up in a bunch of Devils Club not too far away. I was getting a little crabby that I couldn’t get decent fox pictures. The damn thing won’t sit still for three seconds! I was tempted to shot it, then, I could pose him. I really want a good picture of the black fox but, I only saw him twice and once was across the way. This first time would have been great but, by the time I fumbled my camera out of my pocket he had took off. We explored as much as we wanted to with what energy we had and enjoyed moving around checking things out. We glazed some more for bear and elk and eventually our eight days of awesome weather ended.
April 26th and 27th 2008 (Day 9 and 10)
We awoke today to blowing winds, howling up the bay at us sustained probably around forty in the open gusting threw the tree tops around sixty probably. It made going outside the tent miserably cold. We stayed in the tent most of the day, only to get out and stretch a little or pee. Night fell and I had only been out of the tent twice. Jacob seemed content just sitting in his sleeping bag and reading his book. I figured, “whatever”, our charter flight was scheduled to pick us up at 1:30pm on the 27th so no big deal. One lousy night, fine, I can deal. We awoke to even stronger winds in a full on blizzard. I was so pissed off. We hit a storm on the day we are supposed to get picked up? We are down to sharing one meal a day now in efforts to conserve food incase this storm lasts for four or five days. My stomach was growling all day. It was miserably cold and visibility was virtually zero at times and yet we were still convinced that the Beaver would swoop down at 1:30 on the dot and pick us up. Ironically right around 1:30pm, the wind died down to a breeze and we were able to get out of the tent and move the bear hide to a different shelter we had made with the hatchet a couple days prior incase of rain. It didn’t seem all too bad but, I realized that the trees broke the brunt of the storm and the snow so the forest was actually pretty quiet. The second you stepped out onto the beach, you were hit with strong winds and sideways snow pelting your face. 1:30pm came and went and then we then decided that my clock was wrong or they were running a little late. With not even the faintest roar of a propeller in the distance our realization that we were spending another night at least here was quietly accepted by the two of us. We went to bed pissed off, hungry, and wondering how long this storm would last. We have barely left the tent in two days and now a third night. I mean I like Jacob and all but, seriously man… I need some Wenzel space, it is getting cramped up in here and I’m sleeping in soggy clothes and there is some stupid lump under the tent trying to give me an enema every time I shift at night. Being in a tent stuck there for even a couple two days and three nights makes a person think. You have nothing but time and Jacob had the only book. I covered a lot of subjects, most of which I care not to share but, one thought I particularly have returned to over and over again over the years when I’ve been stuck in a tent in a snow storm or have to stay out an extra night miserable, wet, and cold; How the hell did I end up here. I come to the same conclusion every time. It is my Dad’s fault. As a kid, whether I was hiking high in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico or flingin’ trot lines for catfish in the murky waters of the Rio Grande, I was generally on an excursion with my dad. At lunch we would sit for a breather often dozing off for an hour (him more often than I of course) and afterwards it never failed, he would ask me which way the old beat up red GMC was. I’d point and say all cocky, “down the valley, over that hill, and two miles up the second logging you cross”. Mid-afternoon would come and we would began head back. Magic hour followed suit (magic hour is what most people refer to as dusk, but to a hunter/fisherman, that last hour of fading light, the deer and elk come out to graze, the fish start to feed, and the bears begin their nightly stroll down the creek bank. Magic hour is what every hunter waits all day for) and he would make me show him the way back to the truck with the last couple miles using a flashlight in the dark. I was always thrilled to see the faded red pick-up come into beam for as not to go home but, because I had remembered my way. As I got older I wondered if he would just have let me lead him further into the woods if I had been wrong all those times. Seems like something he would do just so he could make fun of me later. We explored all over the country on our near annual summer road trips (we as in me, him, and my brother). From trying to catch Water Moccasins with a fishing net or diving into a pile of poison ivy for a frog in Oklahoma (yeah that landed me in the emergency room in Tallahasee, Florida two days later), camping and fishing on the backwaters of the Mississippi in Louisiana, deep sea fishing for Grouper and Red Snapper off the coast of North Carolina or even taking the ferry out to Catalina Island, California to go check it out, or spinning for Brook Trout in Colorado or Browns in New Mexico. I loved every minute of it, however, my favorite is the time he farted while sitting on a fallen tree. It was only the kind of fart a dad could do. Reverberating down the tree until, I could swear to it, becoming and echoing roar, spooking the entire herd of elk we had just spent the better part of a day stalking into a thunderous mass exodus from the valley floor. Perhaps it is the Boy Scout in him, or because he would rush to the television every Monday and Tuesday evening my entire childhood to watch Nature and Nova but, for some reason, the enthusiasm he has for nature and being in the woods couldn’t even be matched by late loud mouthed Australian, Steve Erwin.

My dad didn’t raise a chemistry and mathematics junkie. My dad didn’t raise a kid who trips over concrete blocks in front of a girl. My dad didn’t raise no girly boy or some kid to can solve the Rubiks cube. My dad didn’t raise a guy who is smart with money, pinching a dollar from a dime.

My dad raised an outdoorsman.

For this I am grateful and will be until I am surely old with a big belly sitting by the lake on a lawn chair having a beer and watching my bobber on a glossy day. Springing into action, if that bobber even as much twitches in the faintest way giving everyone a good show as the old man reels in a trout wearing speedos with a grin simply plastered to his face. Oh and I intend on working those bright yellow skin tight trunks too, throwing in a little hip action with every tug of the line, grunting with my tongue out if he pulls a little line out. I have no intentions of dying without a weathered face full of wrinkles with stories to match each and every one of them. I seem to always come to the same conclusion. As miserable, wet, cold, and flat out crabby I am at that very moment to be where I am and not at home in front of a computer on Myspace or typing a paper or crunching numbers in excel for work, I am happy to be on an excursion, I am happy to be in the woods. With that, I generally just fall back asleep shivering yet fully content. However, I stayed up all night because I had been sleeping for nearly two days already. I laid and thought about all kinds of things and made some interesting conclusions.
April 28th (Day 11)
About five a.m. the wind died off and the snow only lightly pelted the tent. That snow turned to rain in an hour and by dawn, a glossy bay was in view as far as Ban Island. We were lucky. There was no way our plane wouldn’t come pick us up today. This was only a two day storm. The only excuse they would have today was that they forgot. However, being weary of it maybe still storming over in Kodiak we didn’t cross our fingers and instead skipped breakfast and kept to our rations which wasn’t until dinner time and started by tearing everything out of the tent and hanging it up to dry on the nearest branch available. This maybe only a break in the storm and we were going to take full advantage of it to dry out our gear as best we could. We got a fire going and I started to dry out my gloves, boots, and socks. While my tent was still hanging from a tree branch on the rocky beach we both sat up by the fire. There was no mistaking that sound, A De Havilland. We were all giddy after we verified that the Beaver was coming for us, not just passing overhead and immediately threw our wet clothes and stench into the nearest pack and tossed them off the embankment. It took him a while to weave through the ice to get to shore but we wasted no time tossing our gear and nine foot Kodiak Brown Bear hide and skull at the pilot to load for us. We were done with Kodiak. Surely the hunt in itself was odd in that the hunt was a success with the shooting of a large bear but, a failure in the sense that we didn’t find him, he came directly to us. I’ll take it. So we managed to escape the land of the big bears no worse for the wear and am eager to begin planning another trip. Joshua Brown has already mentioned Mexico’s Volcanoes or Dall Sheep above the Arctic Circle and Joshua Coghill, I know, is planning a yet another stellar adventure rafting down the Gulkana River fly fishing for trout and Arctic Grayling with beer in hand. Summer is around the corner. We shall see, we shall see. As we flew out it was easy to see our creek that we had worked so hard looking for bear. The surrounding hills that we had zigzagged across over the last eleven nights and nearly eleven days all blanketed with a foot of fresh snow from our spring blizzard fell behind us I sat back and enjoyed the thought of a warm shower.

I was told a little trip Haiku was in order for trip reports from here on out so here it goes….

Kodiak Brown Bear
Almost Wet My Under-roos
I Want To Go Back

FYI, I get a kick out of the fact it looks like my neck is really long in that picture.. reminds me of one of those Africans you see on the Discovery Channel... Damn I want some gold rings now...

Pictures From Alaska

2008-04-16T10:58:00.001-08:00

After having moved to Fairbanks, the Gulkana River has become something of the getaway river. Lots of good trout up stream, beautiful valley and the best Grayling fishing in the state (or so I've read). Also makes for a great class II/III rafting trip from the headwater to Sourdough.

My Dad made a trip up to Alaska to visit me for a month. I managed to clear my schedule for some adventures. From fishing Silver Salmon to fly fishing rainbows and hooking into some large lake trout. Covered a lot of the state with a bag full of lemon pepper and fishing rods. Bird Creek, Kenai River, Montana Creek, Cleer Creek, and even up to the Dietrich and Atigun Rivers. We hunted and shot black bear. We drove the Dalton Highway and hunted Brooks Range Dall Sheep where I took a couple long shots at a full curl Ram. We spent three straight weeks camping, fishing, and hunting Alaska in its best forms. here are thirty pictures I put up to highlight those three weeks. It was a blast!

Here are some random other pictures as well...

Lots of other slide shows to come when I get them uploaded..

Mountain and Rock Climbing

2008-04-15T14:24:00.000-08:00

A Few Short Trip Reports from Climbing Excursions In Alaska (I'm just putting up a few).

The steel pierces the frozen wind blown snow a mere half inch. Creaking with every step I take, is the satisfaction of making ground and the uneasy feeling of knowing that is another foot in addition to the already over five hundred I would fall if I were to slip. My thighs burn and I stop precariously in the steep gulley to look around. I see peaks glaring across the ancient valley that once carried a large glacier. Alaska seems barren and empty in the winter. Following the ridge line down from the summit I'm working on getting to are what looks to be several false summits. I try not to bother looking down incase I regret telling myself, oh its not that high, just go for it. What am I doing?... no rope, no helmet, or even a first-aid kit in the dead of winter, climbing in Alaska. I only have a mountaineering axe and crampons with which I would probably end up jabbing into myself on accident if I were to fall. Regardless of how I managed to convince myself to go ahead with the climb and my current situation, I couldn't help but smile and look out across the landscape. Its an odd feeling because as much as I want to just turn around and enjoy the view, I really don't want to slip at this point. Ahead of me is a couple that I joined for the climb (I have no idea who the hell they are, I just met them in the parking lot but, the girls not bad looking.. working as a roped team they made quick work of the gulley and I followed suit quietly bitching to myself for not having any safety lines.

Almost two thirds of the way up the gulley, the steepness decreased but, now it became so windblown that the crunching was turning into a scratching as i had to step on ice crusted scree minimally frozen into place. Eventually reaching the summit ridge, we stopped to add a layer for now we were getting beat by the wind from the adjacent valley. The three of us began traversing up the ridge line which was littered with large rocks leading us through a maze of false summits and highly exposed corniced areas. After a good twenty minutes or so, we came to a large cornice overlooking the north face of the peak. After careful consideration we decided on a "safe" spot to take a look over the edge at the 2000' vertical foot drop. both amusing and thrilling. we continued on and I was starting to slow down a bit (it had been six hours of constant climbing by this point). The last obstacle we came to was an avalanche shoot... It didn't even phase me at this point in the day.. we were high enough on the mountain that the risk was minimal. I traversed straight across without even thinking about it.

We reached the summit shortly after and another amazing view came to be. This view is indigenous to Alaska. When you stand on top of a mountain in Colorado, the Rockies sprawl out in broad large peaks with occasional rock routes but, in Alaska, the peaks are jagged and jut straight up from the ocean with a lot of vertical gain.

I started rock climbing back in 1997 when my friend John Donahue invited me to go and have been off and on ever since.. I build up into the 5.12's then I don't climb for a while and then build back up... I'm currently in the building back up phase. Bar none, the best climber that I know is Nathanial Walker. We grew up in the same town and I've know him and his family for the better part of my life. Having climbed with him on several occasions, I've seen him make a 5.12 look like a 5.8. I've seen him climb a sixty foot 5.10 free-solo without flinching. Out of the few times I've climbed with Nathanial, it never failed that I would end up saying, "what the.. how the hell... no way you just did that.." and I'm pretty good!... Its truly crazy to go climbing with someone who is surely one of the best out there.

"This was the Shot of the Month a few years back (If I remember right, it was at Rifle in Colorado).

Working Strange Ranger 5.13d on the Project Wall. After having had only three ascents in previous six years. nathanial is finishing up the crux section here, a desperate rightward traverse on bad slopers capped with this big lunge to a jug."

Photo by: Dave Pegg.

I'm sure I'll put a bunch of my climbing pictures on here at some point along with other mountaineering stuff but alas, I have other stuff I need to be doing right now... Probably after my Kodiak trip.

John Donahue working his way up Un-named 5.12 C/D a couple blocks from my parents house in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He's pretty much a badass as well except when he has sand in his vag. sometimes it takes a lot of arm twisting to get him going... especially these days...

Pre-Kodiak Thoughts

2008-04-14T19:09:00.000-08:00

Nearly every year at some point I open the paper and read about a mauling or attack that ended someone’s life. It almost never fails that the individual was doing something utterly ridiculous or in some fashion, provoking the bear. Having spent nearly eight years camping and hunting in Alaska, I’m constantly amazed by the stupidity of “outdoorsmen” and others such as Timothy Treadwell. In my seasoned outdoor experiences, I have come across numerous grizzlies, some of which quite close but, I have only been confronted by one grizzly that made me nervous. A juvenile grizzly about three or four years of age walked right up to me and my dad trying to get the trout we were carrying. Even then, yelling at the bear a mere thirty feet away managed to make him change his mind. I never even took my rifle off my shoulder (I can’t say the same for dad, for that was his first wild grizzly experience). No doubt, there are indeed circumstances where a bear will “hunt” a human for food, but these are very rare and we have to realize, when in the woods, we are not highest rank on the food chain. I am a firm believer that the vast majority of incidents can be avoided with proper etiquette and knowledge of how bears act and react. Every time I come across a bear in the woods, surely my heart beats a bit faster but, I’m no longer scared as much as I am thrilled that I can share part of my day with an animal as powerful and magnificent as a bear is. You all know that since I spent a good paragraph bitching about how people act and provoke bear attacks that I will probably end up getting eaten by a bear. I just hope that by bringing up this fact, it’s more of a double jinx and that I will get back in one piece.

“There can be no death any more horrifying than one of a bear attack. Even the mere thought of a bear mauling a person sends shivers to the most seasoned and experienced outdoorsman. It addresses a pronounced deep and primal fear within all humans, the fear of death of being killed by a wild animal.”

Jim Oltersdorf of Soldotna, Alaska commenting on Ken Cates (Soldotna) death after he was bitten on the head by a Coastal Brown Bear crushing his skull in May of 1999.

According to the Alaska State Department of Fish and Game, Kodiak Brown Bears are considered a subspecies of the grizzly bear living exclusively in the Kodiak Archipelago in isolation for over 10,000 years. These bears are the largest in the world standing over ten feet high when standing on his hind legs and five feet at the shoulder on all fours. Weighing up to 1,500 pounds, Kodiak’s bears are often touted as the world’s largest land carnivore man eaters. Ironically fatalities from these bears are few in number (likely due to the inaccessibility of the area) however; even with few people exploring the archipelago, maulings occur almost annually. Is it the testosterone thrill that some pay 10,000-21,000 dollars to hunt these massive Kodiak bears? Regardless of the motives, every year, nearly five hundred people from around the world get a chance to hunt these bears and many of them go home empty handed, some with trophies and occasionally one with scars and a story for the grand kids. So what is my motive? To explore a place I have never been and to experience the mecha of bear hunting. Regardless if we shoot a bear or not, I know that I absolutely love being out and about. I know positively, that when I wake up in the morning and crawl out of the tent shivering cold to the bone to start a pot of coffee... I’ll look around, watching the snow capped mountains gain an outline at dawn and at that moment, all the drama, all the gossip, all the work, every mundane day to day crap everyone has to deal with will be gone. I will sip my coffee with a huge smile on my face because this is where I want to be.

I’ve had some opportunities in life to go and do some amazing things... I’ve stalked antelope on the prairie, bear in Alaska and New Mexico, elk on the edge of the Valle Grande, deer in Lincoln National Forrest, buffalo along the Chitina River, dall sheep in the Brooks Range, I’ve hiked through the Rocky Mountains and Sangre De Cristos, fished brook trout in Montana streams, climbed the majority of Colorado’s 14’ers, Fished islands in the Aleutians that probably hadn’t been fished since WWII. Caught 200 lb + halibut while watching orcas swim around the boat in a bay where we could see a smoking volcano only ten miles away. I’ve hooked Tuna trolling off the coast of Vancouver B.C... I’ve stood in the crows nest of a crabbing boat in the Bering sea with thirty foot waves and seventy mile an hour wind. I could go on and on but with every adventure I go on, I return and then I begin to think of yet another that I can’t wait to go on….

This made me laugh... I get an e-mail from my mom... her departing words to me...

"Please be safe and have fun. Are you done with

high risk activiites (not the kind in bed). Please say yes."

love mom

Afognak Island Here I Come…… So I suppose this means that if I don't have a trip report up by the first weekend in May, then uhm, I'm pretty much gonna be spread around Afognak in piles of bear shit.

Commercial Fishing Excerpt

2008-04-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

An Excerpt From My Six Months At Sea.

(I'll Put Pictures In When I get Around To It. This was written when I was 20 years old) If there was one thing I learned from spending six months traveling around Alaska on a Crabbing boat was what a hard days work really entails... 9-5 .. pish posh.. thats nothing.. We sometimes worked 40 hours straight.. When the fishing is good, you work until its not good anymore. Makes me realize just how easy I got these days now that I set my own hours.

A small warn yellow duffle bag slid down the shoot following an Alpine Lowe backpack. Pushing through the herd of people I grabbed by bags and headed out to the white Chevy Z71 in the parking lot. Dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, my captain drove me to his Seattle house explaining that he filled the positions for the remaining crew with a kid from Oregon and the same engineer as the previous summer. I crashed on the couch of the captain’s house in Seattle for the night. Captain is an interesting fellow. Having to keep everything in order constantly he was nearly obsessive compulsive, but it worked well for him because of what he does for a living. Owning two houses and playing in the stock market, he diligently keeps himself busy with either construction or fishing. His little poodle of a dog is the one thing that made my head turn. It just didn’t fit. Here was a man, a construction worker, a commercial fishing boat captain, yelling “here Ginger” at his rabbit sized poodle. (Above, the crabbers lined up at Seattle's Fishermans Terminal, I worked on the Norseman II, a 120' crabbing boat). He obviously was a man who was willing to take chances to get ahead in life; this is where my respect for him came from. In the boom years of the crabbing industry, Captain was out there in the ferocious Bering Sea in the ill-equipped boats of the time. Sometimes working the near constant launching and hauling of crab pots for all but the holidays. He gave me a chance, a New Mexican boy who had seen waves in National Geographic articles about the surf.
The morning rolled around and a quick walk several houses down the steep street provided excellent Danish’s at their local market. The three of us loaded the Chevy with rakes, shovels and wheel barrow and drove a couple miles down to Fisherman’s Terminal. We pulled along a small seining boat tied neatly to the wooden dock. In the middle of a serious overhaul, the boat had little paint and tools sprawled across the deck. A kid jumped out of the boat and hopped into the bed of the truck wedging himself between the wheel barrow and cab. I asked what was going on and he replied since he was letting me stay at his house until we were ready to leave on our voyage, I was going to help him move some wood chips to landscape his other suburban home. Fair enough I suppose. (To the left is a plane wreck we came across in the Aleutian Islands) Driving through Seattle, Captain pointed out buildings he did construction on during the winter months. Half an hour passed as we weaved through the horrid Seattle traffic until we arrived at his second home.
Captain built this house. Its long gravel driveway passed a large pile of woodchips and neatly mowed grass as it led to his dream home. This house was the one he was supposed to grow old in with his woman. Things obviously didn’t work out for whatever reason since this house was rented out and he lived as a single in his other home. Moving a little wood wasn’t a bad price to pay but this was a pile high enough to consider mountaineering.
We all hopped out of the truck and I met the guy who jumped on at the dock. Lars, A muscular kid about my age, was from Denmark. He had heard about the vast abundance of money available in the fishing industry and was in the United States on a work visa for the summer. Having lived in various countries around the world Lars was intriguing because of his wealth of knowledge and captivating stories. I tried to remember what he said as we started tell jokes and stories as we started to spread out the wet smelly wood chips. Near the summit of the chip pile a yellow dump truck moved along with its load of chips. Pushing the overloaded truck along a young boy, who lived in the house was attempting to help but, was getting in the way. Somewhere around 30 yards of damp heavy woodchips were spread out in a manner of hours and we headed back to his other home for the evening. After I showered, we baked some sockeye on a propane grill. Eating the fish, we sat on the back deck of his house watching the sun set. Night came pretty quick with a full stomach of salmon and I crashed quietly on the couch nudging the rather vocal white poodle out of my spot.
The next day came and again the little walked provided several freshly made pudding filled donuts. We sat around the living room watching the morning news while the Australian read previous day’s Wall Street Journal.
The boat slammed down on wave, waking me in the middle of a gale. What day is it? How long have I been laying here? Four days have past since we left Seattle’s Fisherman’s Terminal. My bunk, one of four crammed into a room most people wouldn’t consider large enough for a bathroom is drenched in sweat. Dehydrated and groggy I wrestled out my nest of sweat and stumbled out into the dining area. A pan tightly fastened to the stove was filling the boat with the smell of onions, black pepper and meat. My stomach quenches and I grab onto the wall for balance as we head into yet another wave. The diesel caterpillar engine and generators whine and fill the air with noise. Where is everyone? I smell cigarette smoke--I bet the engineer is smoking under the protected deck. I work my way up to the narrow stairs into wheel house where I find the other deck hand and captain laughing as the bow of the boat pounded down into another wave sending water screaming at the thick windows of the forward house. They were enjoying the gale. Captain smiles and says “well guess who woke up”? How long have I been out? I mutter. For nearly four days I hadn’t moved an inch. Feeling a little better I retreated back down stairs and followed the smell of smoke outside. The engineer was right where I thought he was. I longed for a cigarette but was satisfied with the mist from the broken waves filling my lungs and soothing my face. Another big wave hit and I grabbed onto a bar to keep me from loosing my balance. I ask myself why on earth would I get a job on fishing boat when I knowingly get seasick; again nonetheless. A painful dry heaving session left me weak, but remarkably, I felt better.
Eight days had passed since we had left Seattle and vomiting was all but a memory as I stood out on the bow looking with enthusiasm as we approach the land which I have grown to love, Alaska. Over the sky-scraping mountains the sun turned the clouds endless shades of pink and red. Night fell and I would awake at our destination, King Cove, Alaska.
I leaped out of bed after the captain called up and throw on my shoes and headed out on the deck. Tying up the 120 foot boat is not very difficult but the trick is to handle the three inch thick rope without having your hand ripped off by the boats momentum. With the captain yelling from the wheel house the boat docked and I jumped down to the dock to stand on land. Lightly swaying as I walked to the pay phone to call my girlfriend and let her know I made it back to Alaska.
Our emergency getaway craft was something of a joke. A hole was put into the floor of the 12' LUND skiff by forklift leaving the aluminum hull with a baseball sized hole. With a few screws and plate, the hole was carefully sealed and our vintage smoking 2 stroke outboard attached. A strike began as opening day started and lasted for nearly a week as fisherman negotiated their price with the large companies. A restless felling set in and we all went exploring on the nearby Unga Island. I fished for halibut off the boat and for dollies in the creeks the flowed from the volcano. We eventually were put on contract as the fisherman started to settle and were sent to Bristol Bay. The Bering Sea was quiet this time, thankfully, because it has ability to become some of the deadliest water in the world. For several seemingly endless weeks of crane driving and making trips to and from the bay area and even making trip back up the peninsula a good day to take fish in the shadow of the smoking Pavlof Volcano; which turned out to be more than we bargained for.
Arriving early at volcano, the lone two fishing boats hadn’t caught anything yet so it was a day off in the shade. With the binoculars we spotted a small creek running into the ocean about a half mile off. The engineer and I decided to take our barely floating skiff in for a fishing trip seeking the delicious relative to the Arctic Char, the Dollie. We pulled up onto the shore and walked up the little beach to the top of the little hill to take a look at the creek and its origins. A massive Coastal Brown Bear stood out against shrubbery 200yards off and looked at us nonchalantly and turned its head walking up the steep hill out of sight. The engineer said he will be back but for now, its time to go fishing. Our captain watching the bear in the binoculars from the boat had tried to radio us the sighting, but to no avail since our radio was left neatly packed in the skiff. I put on a little spinner and threw out a cast. Retrieving the large Pink Salmon with the small light weight rod proved time consuming and fun, but I wanted the Dollies. The little creek swarmed with salmon and with every cast I either snagged a salmon or one aggressively tried to swallow my spinner whole. Discouraged thinking there were no Dollies I moved into in the faster water and immediately had a nice little Dollie hooked. The grass, near shoulder height was hard to move around in so I kept to the shore of the creek where I stepped in bears tracks wherever I moved. Looking up stream at the engineer to see how he was doing a large brown head popped up out of the grass a mere 100 yards behind him and then disappeared. I motioned to him that the bear was on the creek up ahead of him so the engineer retreated back towards me. I am weary of such a potentially dangerous invisible animal near I constantly looked around while I cast for the Dollies. Every ten minutes or so the large bear would stand on its hind legs and look around, it was then that we would spot him and then move around accordingly; during the ten minutes in between sightings we had no idea where he was. After not sighting our friend for a shot while we stepped up on the little hill we originally climbed over to try to spot our large advancing invisible bear. We could not see him, but when we turned and looked out at our boat, it was not where we left it. The tide had come in and dislodged our boat from its position up on the rocks and was floating out in the water several hundred feet offshore. Quickly grabbing my fishing rod we ran down to the shore closest to our floating skiff. I waded out waist deep and started casting out to the boat trying snagging something in hopes of reeling it back in. The spinner was too light and I could not cast the distance that was required. While stripping down to his underwear the engineer told me to get him a fire going because when he got back he would be cold. I immediately went on a search for wood while trying to keep an eye out for out friend and the engineer. A daunting task considering there is not a single tree naturally growing in this environment. With several small pieces of drift wood and a portion of my pants the fire was started. The engineer had gained ground on our drifting skiff. The riptide was not only moving our boat further out to sea but down the shore line and I quickly found fire in the wrong location. I ran down the beach several hundred yards and started the fire building task once more. Ten minutes had passed and I could see the 40 degree water had the engineer slowing down. The skiff clearly was clearly out of reach. I yelled to the engineer to come back and he stopped swimming and treaded water facing me. I could barely hear his weak voice but the message was clear, “I can’t make it, come get me”. The biggest decision of my life is right before my eyes. If I swim out I could reach him but could I make it back? I decided that if I swam for him I would be in the exact same predicament that he was in, so I encouraged him to swim in on his own. For whatever reason confused or disoriented he started swimming further out. I kept yelling and eventually coaxed him in to the point where I new I could safely get out and back. With the engineer curled up around the little fire, I noticed the anchored on our main boat had been pulled and the remaining two on board maneuvering their way to the skiff. I ran back up the beech and got the engineers clothes and put them on. His body was like that on an ice burg, light blue and cold. After having to wait for the skiff to float into deep water before safely perusing, the two had the skiff in hand. Vintage as the outboard was, with the throttle wide open the skiff bounced from wave to wave towards shore. The deckhand smiled and said “Ugh! I made fire!” pertaining to the movie watched the night before with Tom Hanks. He soon realized the situation and became serious as we lifted the semi-conscious engineer into the skiff and whined the outboard back to the boat. The captain who had seen the bear and saw the engineer on the shore but not in the water assumed the bear attacked and was surprised not to see blood. I told him he had been in the water for nearly a half hour. The captain hopped into a bunk with the engineer and we covered them with what blankets and sleeping bags we could find. Eventually the engineer regained this coherent ness and before me and the other deckhand had returned from the creek again with the fish we had left he was outside smoking a cigarette waiting to gut his catch. A scary scene and definitely a clear memory for years to come, the fisherman showed up with their fish. I worked all night moving fish with the crane and vacuum until the fishing boats were empty. We delivered our fish and quickly we’re sent back up to Bristol Bay.
After receiving no fish at the Nushagak River we were told to head out to Dutch Harbor (Unalaska Island) in the Aleutian Islands. Immediately following the call for Dutch Harbor the anchor was pulled and a course across the Bering Sea was scribbled into the log book.
Looking at the weathered sea charts it was easy to determine that we were further out in the Bering Sea then the King Crabbers go. With that in mind I was a little nervous as I tried to climb into my bunk as the floor moved back and forth. I awoke for my shift of driving the boat to find we were headed in the wrong direction. Apparently in the night another call was placed and we were sent back to King Cove. Arriving in King Cove we were handed a few boxes of gear and sent back out towards Dutch Harbor. Unimak Pass is nestled between Unimak Island and the rest of the true Aleutian Islands and is where the warmer Pacific Ocean butts up against the frigid Bering Sea. This is where our only obstacle lays; Unimak Pass. With a little wind a froth of waves and irregular currents often turn deadly. This is where the weather captain says, “...is sometimes so bad that you can not tell if you are going forwards or backwards.” We passed the last smoking volcano on the Alaskan peninsula and started our voyage into the Aleutian Islands. The glossy water swirled as we headed into the pass but not even a single gust of wind jutted out from any of the volcano’s and our pass was uneventful. The dolphins raced the boat until their boredom ended the show. We settle down in the wheel house smelling the cooking turkey in the oven and watched the humpback whales breech off in the distance blowing water high into the sky. Occasionally a pod of killer whales would appear and show their massive 5 foot long drooping dorsal fins only to dive again.
Dutch Harbor’s night lights were more inviting than the water as the diesels engines were cut down to move up to the dock. We tied up to the same dock that during WW II the Japanese sunk one our large Navy ships. WWII unfortunately is not the only event that sunk ships in the area. Routine storms pound in from the Bering Sea crushing sturdy boats with winds pressing 100mph and 50 foot waves. The shore lines show all over the Aleutians, the importance of paying close attention to weather patterns. The skeletons of boats that never came back to the harbor are seen occasionally, rusting away the bunks that once held a hard working crew.
Morning came and showed exactly why I have grown to love this land. The beyond green hills with hill mountainsides sparsely covered with snow even during these summer month of July The eerie island still sports machine gun dugouts throughout the town of Unalaska and scattered around its green hills. A true fisherman’s town, Unalaska and its surrounding water has arguably the best halibut fishing in the world. Dutch Harbor, the hub of commercial fishing in Alaska and is home to the infamous Elbow Room. The bar caters too many of the sea going men who pass through this center community, waving the pockets full of money, hard earned from pulling their crab pots and surviving the season. The bar is properly named for the many rough and rowdy men who want to get in a little fun before taking on the Bering Sea once more.
We awaited the call as the small planes circled around the bay in attempt to find the enormous schools of fish coming to spawn. With a clear go, all the boats cluttering the bay no longer idled. Nets littered the harbor and the fisherman started the daunting task of pulling their catch back to the boat. The disappointed look of the warn fisherman’s face is saddening. Some of them even came thousands of miles for the 15 minutes of Dutch Harbor herring fishing for nothing. A pile of jellyfish and other useless sea dwelling critters filled the bottoms of many of held the sad faces they will carry home. There were however, the few out of the bunch who hit the big leagues and had well over a hundred thousand pounds of herring, so much that they could not pull their nets on board. Our diesel kicked into gear and we pulled up to a boat with a net so heavy that the edge of the boat is only mere centimeters of going under water. (Above: Makushin Bay, a halibut fishermans dream) I lift the huge vacuum tube with the crane lowering one end into the net to the adjacent boat and turn on the Trans Vac pumping herring strait out of the water into our tanks filled with chilled water. Fishing boats waited and one by one as the Tender boats wondered around and vacuumed up there fish for them and started to head back home. The skies, most places filled with seagulls where littered with Bald Eagles swooping down picking up missed herring with their talons. We started back for King Cove, our heavy load lowering the boat into the water making the ride in the building wave’s bearable smoother. Arriving back in King Cove as the weather deteriorated, I happily climbed on shore and called my girlfriend. Over the next few days our herring load was emptied and we retreated off the dock in the bay and anchored up.
A horrid fishing season was leaving many people edgy about further contracts and the potential of being dropped from their current one. Standing on the deck of company’s favorite boat was soothing. After nearly a week of sitting on anchor staring at land we got a call and were told to report to Prince William Sound.
It was blowing hard when we left gusting well into the gale status but, luckily it was at our tail and made for a faster and smoother ride. Within a day we were working our way behind Kodiak Island. It is nice to get into the land of trees once more. The shore lines cluttered with trees and small creeks

Buffalo Hunting in Alaska

2008-04-14T15:33:00.000-08:00

Buffalo Hunting (Chitina Herd, Alaska)

With only two permits awards per year to hunt the Chitina Herd, we applied and on the first try, obtained a permit. The odds of obtaining this very permit was 0.5%.

I left Fairbanks around 7:15pm heading south with no other directions to the rest of the group except a brief call and instructions that I had to park and walk across a bridge to the hotel in McCarthy. Sounded easy enough. The sky drew dark as I came into Delta Junction and worked my way down towards Paxson. Rabbits everywhere.. Must have been a good rain year... Twenty miles from Paxson, I had to slow down due to around fifty Caribou crossing the road. I gassed up in Glennallen and kept heading south to the Chitina turn off. It was nearly 11:30pm by the time reached Chitina and the bumpy two lane highway ended abruptly with with a sign that read 'One Lane Next 60miles'. Sure enough, I had heard the rumors, A one lane dirt road through the hills for the last sixty miles to town... Why don't they just pave the damn thing. I pressed on at 30mph for the next two hours and as abruptly as it begun, the road ended in a small parking lot with about six cars and 330 miles from Fairbanks. I knew I was in the right spot because the Craft's truck was there. I saw a man picking up some fire wood and I asked him if he knew where the bridge was to the hotel. I was pointed in the direction of the bridge and was told that the hotel was about a mile down that path.... That path? Why the heck can't you drive to the hotel.. who wants to book a hotel that you have to tote all your luggage too? (hindsight showed that the entire town of McCarthy was over that footbridge so just about everyone had to walk in.) I strapped on my head lamp and .44 mag to my belt and started the walk... Must be a rather large river, it was really loud and the foot bridge was around 100yards in length. I got a bit spooked after the bridge. maybe it was the sign regarding the bears and it being two in the morning.. I dunno. I just kept following the pathway until finally a mile later I arrived in McCarthy. I walked down the dirt road (downtown) and saw a sign that read like it was out of a western movie, "Ma Johnson's Hotel". I guess this is the hotel.. I walked in and and no one in sight.. just a little hand written note that said.. “Buddy Wenzel, Craft's in room 112”. Fair enough.. I wondered down the short hallway (just a rather large house with a bunch of rooms) and I could hear Dirk (Sr.) snoring... yup this is it.. I opened the door and saw and empty cot. I crashed immediately, only to wake a few hours later to the sound of a chain saw outside.

Our flight time was set for 9am so we got things rolling fairly quickly in the morning. Gathered our gear and made last minute decisions as to what would be left behind (60lb max /pp). Our pilot came and picked us up and drove us over to the airstrip where we threw everything into the back of the plane and jumped in. I hate planes, but small planes I really hate! I was afraid to move much in fear of hitting switches with my knees. We flew up valley for about 45 minutes skirting the cliffs and watching sheep run as we buzzed them. We then made several tight circles about 100 feet off the ground as the pilot scoped out the landing area.. It was a bumpy landing on the gravel bed near the Chitina River. We were here. We threw everything on the dirt and the pilot wasted no time leaving... Now we are stuck... It would probably take five days to hike to the nearest phone if you were walking hard. And of course shortly after the pilot left we realized we had forgotten some stuff... Always happens... Except this was rather important; Dr. Craft forgot his diabetic medications so we got a bit antsy and worried. But there was nothing we could do now, no satellite phone. We just have to take it easy on him and let him take his time and rest all he needs. After getting camp situated, Dirk (Sr.) layed down to rest while me and Dirk (Jr.) went for a scout. The two of them had flown around the area the day prior and had taken an aerial survey of the surroundings looking for bullafo so we knew there where at least four or five in the general proximity of camp. We walked a good four miles up the river bed uttlerly amused by how large the wolve tracks were and by the enormous grizzly bear tracks in the mud.. the claw marks were a good two and half inches from the pad so with the curve I bet they were easily over 3 1/2 inch claws. We looked hard for buffalo but could not find any. After four miles we decided to hit the shrubbery along the tree line for the walk back to camp. when we were about two miles out from camp we reached a small clearing with about a dozen or so five foot in diameter dug out beds in the sand.. these have to be where the buffalo are bedding down. We were checking each one to see how fresh they were, none of them were used since the last rain. Then I heard something and looked up, I saw a large buffalo about forty yards in front of me just staring me down. I motioned to Dirk that he was there... we were just stunned... He wasn't afraid, in fact after standing there for a few moments, we started moving around to his side in plane sight to make sure he was a male and then he quickly stepped broad side to show off his size to us.. He was huge... We decided to back off and leave him as is and walk back to camp and get Dirk (Sr.) to come take a look. We finished the eight mile trek and the three of us returned as night was falling, but could not locate the bull. We returned back to camp just as darkness fell. My legs were already a bit tired from the 12 mile walk today and if I only knew that this was going to be my easy day, I wouldn't have whined so much about it. Dirk (Sr.) crashed in his tent while me and Dirk (Jr.) sat around a camp fire for a bit and yapped a bit (mostly about his cousin, who I happened to be dating).

We got up early the next day and loaded up the rifles, Its been 24hrs since landing so its go time (Alasks law stipulates that you cannot hunt big game within 24hrs of flying in most circumstances). We walked up about a mile past where we saw the bull and Dirk (Sr.) took a rest while me and his son went into the bush to find the buffalo and then return to get his dad ( we figured it would be best way to keep his dad rested considering his lack of medication). We walked into the bush and made a sweep about a 1 1/2 miles down and then back up to his dad, but no buffalo only very fresh sign down where we turned around. It was thick, I climbed a tree and tried to get a vantage point, but still could not see.. It was just amazing how such a large animal can just disappear. After returning, all three of us made our way back to camp, via the shrubbery in hopes of seeing him a second time, to no avail. We arrived back at camp for lunch. Dirk (Sr.) took a rest while me and Dirk (Jr) scouted out the other side of camp. We made a 2 mile loop but with not fresh sign we decided that the Bull was still up in that area somewhere, we just had to widen our parameters. We walked back up the valley where we saw the bull but went the four miles we had done initially and then turned around to work the tree line like we did the first day. We walked back down into the early we were at in the morning and then continued deeper into in the brush over many small creeks with salmon and tons of bear activity. We popped out about the brush about a mile from camp. Dirk (Jr.) was a bit perturbed at the lack of Buffalo sighting for the day, and we started to head back aross the mile wide river bed to camp when I found a fresh bed and sign. I called back to Dirk to come check it out... This was fresh. I told him they were close! I followed the tracked out a ways and saw another bed and Dirk found more sign, this is good, more than one buffalo was just here...I was walking around trying to figure out which way they headed out by looking at their tracks when Dirk spotted them about 800 yards off working their way across the river bed towards our camp. I grabbed the Leica rangefinder/binoculars and sure enough, that was a big bull in the lead. I made Dirk a quick deal that I would run back and get his dad while he tried to get into shooting position himself. We wanted his dad to shoot it. I jogged parallel to the buffalo the mile back to camp and got Dirk (Sr) up and going.. I got him in a vector that would intersect the buffalo and told him where Dirk (Jr.) was in relation. I ran back down the the creek bed to Dirk (Jr.) and let him know where his dad was and then I took up position right in the middle. we worked into the bush. I stopped all of sudden when I heard the sound of horse.. It was them, they must be only fifty feet or so through that bush.. then it went quiet.. they were moving.... about thirty seconds later, I hear a shot, followed by a second, then a third... then nothing. It can from the direction of Dirk (Jr.) I worked by way over to Dirk (Sr.) then we walked down out of the brush. I could see off on the other side of the river bed about a mile off, two buffalo standing there and then one more larger buffalo in the middle of the river bed. He got it! Since I knew Dirk (Jr.) had limited rounds in his .375 H&H mag, I grabbed Dirk (Sr.)'s .300 WSM and jogged out to the scene. The Bull had passed by the time I arrived, completely drenched from crossing the river in a hurry, I congratulated Dirk (Jr.) and handed him a knife. It was nearly dark, and with no headlamps on us, the three of us had to make a walk to camp and get provisions before we could get to work on the massive animal. The day ended in the dark with about 19 miles on foot of which 2 was jogging.

Day three soon arrived and Me and Dirk (Jr) walked the mile to the downed bull in predawn hours with a backpack, diamond sharpener and seven or eight knives.. Today was to be a long one. We started the task of taking the hide, which was more than a little task with a hide nearly 2 inches thick in places. Dirk (Sr) arrived a couple hours into it and the three of us had the animal half skinned and had taken two quarters off in a few hours. Dirk (Jr) took the first load. We tied then entire hind quarter to a frame and Dirk (Sr) and me hoisted it up in on his son. I quarter was least a hundred lbs. Dirk (Jr) started to make his walk threw the river back to camp. There was no way to avoid getting wet. The river was at least mid-shin deep which put it high enough to swamp our feet with glacier water. Dirk (Sr) and me continued to work on the buffalo until Dirk (Jr) returned, I got loaded up with a quarter and started my trip while the two of them worked on the buffalo... Me and Dirk (Jr) kept switching off carry 80-100lb loads to camp with water logged boots until dark. When night fell all that was left at the downed sight was the hide and skull. I ate a quick dinner at the camp fire and had some coffee while drying out my boots... I crashed tired and sore from carrying the loads. The day ended quiety in the dark with about 8 miles on foot of which three had at least an 80lb load.

The morning came and we still had a lot of work to do. Dirk (Jr.) and myself went back down to the carcass to get the remainder of the bull. I loaded up with skull and the and the gear on my frame while he had his rifle and cape on his.. This was heavy and we still had the remainder of the hide which was about 100lbs folded up. There just was not way we could get this all in one trip. We left the rest of the hide and went back to camp. We were in a hurry because our pilot was scheduled to pick us up at ten am so we had to shuttle all the meat and camp over to the landing sight. We finished getting the gear over and ten minutes later the bush plane arrived. The Pilot was fasinated by the bull.. He mentioned that it was the largest he had ever seen and that we should get it check against the current record. Dirk (Sr.) and the meat was loaded onto the plane which left no extra weight for either our gear or Dirk (Jr) and myself. The Pilot would have come back.. we had at least an hour to get down to the carcass and get the hide now! we did just that. Dirk (Jr) and me got back to the landing sight and within fifteen minutes, the buzz of the plane could be heard and soon we were loading the truck with the spoils of a long weekend with about 31 miles on foot. I drove the 330miles back to Fairbanks with a nice big smile…

The Craft boys were excited to have their buffalo and thanked me for being the logistical planner and for pushing them to go. I am grateful to Dr. Craft for letting me plan and take part in that hunt and especially for paying my way (all I had to pay for was gas to drive down and back) and I’m fully aware that he spent thousands. He was even gracious enough to have the hide tanned and gave it to me along with several hundred pounds of the professionally processed buffalo meat.