In 2021, my cousin Jared asked me if I’d be interested in hunting Barren-ground caribou in the Arctic Circle of Alaska with his dad, brother, and friend. After a short conversation with my wife, I said, “Hell yes!” We booked the trip but had to wait until 2023 to hunt. Being from the Midwest, I needed some time to acquire the gear needed to hunt in an inhospitable place such as the North Slope.
We spent hours talking about this trip, all the animals and scenery we’d see, as well as fish we’d hopefully catch and eat. It was taking forever for August of 2023 to come, and we went over gear lists again and again. One day in July of 2022, I received a call that Jared had been in a horrible accident at work. He had burned the majority of his body and was being flown to a hospital in St. Louis. He hung on in the burn center for the longest month of our lives, but on August 15th, we lost him. He was 33 years old. This turned our lives upside down.
Our little hunting party spent more time together after that doing things that Jared loved – bow shoots, hunting, and proceeding with the planning of our caribou hunt. In August of 2023, we flew from St. Louis to Fairbanks, rented a truck, and drove to Prudhoe Bay. The drive itself was an adventure, and we saw some of the most amazing landscape we’ve ever seen.
On August 11th, we made a 50-mile trip down the Sag River via airboat where we set up a camp with the Brooks Range in the background. The next few days were spent hiking, glassing, and fishing for grayling, which was a blast. I walked for miles through the most remote area I’ve ever been in and glassed up my first muskox, grizzly bear, moose, and caribou. I ate blueberries and took naps in the tussocks. All firsts for a Midwesterner.
On day four after seeing caribou moving across a creek from me for the past couple days, I hiked west of camp to try to get in front of one. I watched caribou moving north two miles west of me all morning. After watching a bull come over the horizon and bed down, I decided I would try to get in the path he would likely take once he got up. I packed up my tripod and started winding around the hill I had been sitting on when I saw the velvet tips of antlers on the other side of the same hill I stood on.
I knelt down and took my rifle off my backpack and got ready for a shot, only I wouldn’t have the vitals in sight with the hill between us without letting myself be seen. I looked through my binos and saw five good-sized bulls, but one of them was huge. I slowly stood up with my rifle up and double checked to make sure I was on the biggest bull as they kept changing position. I squeezed the trigger, and he immediately dropped while the other four ran about 40 yards and then stopped and looked back at me. After I decided they were never going to leave, I started to walk up to my bull and he just seemed to get bigger the closer I got. I could not believe my luck.
After taking a hundred pictures, I broke him down and started to make my first four and a half-mile trip through the tundra back to camp. Once back at camp, I noticed the meat poles had four bags hanging on them already. Both my cousin Joe and his friend Bryan had doubled on two huge bulls earlier that morning and were currently filling a stringer with grayling for supper that night. We had a celebratory whiskey shot or two that night and had caribou backstraps and arctic grayling, which was one of the best suppers I’ve had. We celebrated into the night or day or whatever you call it when it’s still light at 11 p.m.
The next day, the three of us went back to pack out the rest of our meat and antlers and Uncle Jeff continued to hunt, but we all had other things on our mind. That day marked one year since Jared’s passing. We spent the evening around the fire telling all of the crazy stories about him. Him getting caught overnight in the mountains during a snowstorm in Colorado while elk hunting, him only taking one pair of clothes to a weekend-long deer camp and getting them covered in blood the first day, getting attacked by a bobcat. The stories go on and on.
The next two days were spent caping, fleshing our capes, and fishing while glassing throughout the day. On our last full day in camp, Joe spotted three bulls about 900 yards from camp moving to the north. Uncle Jeff grabbed his rifle and took off to try to get ahead of them. We set up a spotter and our binos on tripods and filmed him as they moved towards him. We could hear a faint “pop” and could see him throw his hands up in the air as he jumped up and down. It was so cool to see the last tag get punched while we were all together.
We grabbed our bags and went out to help him pack the bull back to camp. There was some serious celebrating that night, and Joe roasted some caribou ribs over the fire. This trip ended up being so much more than I could ever have expected. It will be one that the four of us will never forget, and I know Jared was with us the whole time.
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