“I bet there’s a huge, old monster living up there!” I’d often spoken these words as a naive, energetic, young hunter looking at some cliffy pocket of mountaintop trees or a ridiculously inaccessible sliver of public land on a map. In the past two decades, I’ve put in the effort to get to some of those places only to discover the e’s not a giant mule deer in every pocket of high alpine timber and there’s not a huge, old bull elk in every locked-up sliver of public land. More often, getting to those places only gave me the vantage to see those animals far down the valley in friendlier habitat or safely tucked away on private ground. Animals don’t want to be in those horrible, inhospitable places any more than we do. I’m not a fast learner, but I’ve come to realize that sheer determination and physical effort are usually not the primary ingredients to a successful hunt, but there are exceptions.
Alaska is a place that will try to kill you. Humans just can’t stay in the Alaskan bush for long. As Brad said while we were planning our self-guided, river-raft moose hunt, “We pack what we need to get out of there, not what we need to live there.” It only takes a couple small mistakes in the Alaskan bush before you’re in serious danger. Brad and I felt prepared for this, but the sheer physical effort of a double on Alaskan bull moose took us to our limit.
The cold rain was already falling hard when the Lake & Peninsula air taxi dropped us at a remote runway. The river surging out of the glaciers in the mountains behind us was swollen and dirty. We had 40 miles and 10 days between us and the take-out point. The river was high, but our spirits were not. We spent that day and the next in our heavy rain gear, setting up the raft, organizing and securing gear, and planning our first down-river campsite. When we got there, the raft had taken a beating and we were exhausted, having paddled hard in the fast, shallow channels that continually split and twisted in the riverbed. Our camp on the gravel bar was two miles from the high, willow-filled valley we would hunt. We knew the difficulty of traveling on foot through Alaskan tundra, alder thickets, and steep shale scree, but it’s still an absolute grind.
It was already late afternoon when we crested into the valley, but in the next few hours, we glassed three bulls, two that we thought would make the legal 50" width. The season opened the following morning, but our optimism soured quickly. The unrelenting rain had returned, and Brad had come down with a heavy respiratory infection and severe fatigue. We slogged back to the high valley only to find the bulls moving far up-valley and out of reach. Watching these giant deer move easily through the tangled brush is so humbling, and watching was all we could do.
The following morning, one of the legal bulls was bedded only a few hundred yards from our glassing knob, and Brad slipped into the willows downwind of him. From my vantage, I watched as he crept within 80 yards of the now browsing bull, and his first shot cracked the morning air. He shot twice more before the bull fell into a willow-choked streambed. Our usual sense of accomplishment and celebration was seriously diminished by the realization of the task ahead. These animals are truly huge, and moving that much meat down to the river would be a herculean task. Shooting two bulls in this high valley would likely be a mistake.
The next morning, I shot the second bull in the high valley. He fell only a few hundred yards from Brad’s bull, now safely dressed and stored in meat bags. With two giants down, tags cut, pictures taken, and celebration over, the magnitude of the task settled on us. Brad was weak from illness, camp was two miles away, we had roughly 1,400 lbs. of carcass to move through grizzly country, and it was raining again. We spent the next five days packing meat, worrying, and rotating through sets of wet clothes. Brad’s coughing kept the bears aware of our location. Our raisin-skinned feet developed hotspots, then blisters. Unholy amounts of ibuprofen and coffee were consumed. We pounded calories, rested, and packed meat. Brad lost sleep; I lost weight. We were pushing the limits of our bodies. Our final trip out, after stripping the chocolate velvet off the bull’s antlers, was satisfying, but even more challenging, pushing through walls of alder branches with wide, white antlers on our backs.
The relief of having the bulls at the river was short-lived. Ahead of us were another 30 river miles, and now the raft would be loaded and sitting deep, scraping more rocks, and nearly impossible to steer with paddles. Despite immense effort, we bounced off rocks, branches, and cutbanks over the next two days. The floor of the raft was punctured in several places, and we took on water. We alternated between sessions of intense paddling and sessions of intense bilge pumping. In the evenings, we hauled out, set up camp, and glassed the black bears that could always be seen hoovering up blueberries on the alpine slopes above the river. We both had bear tags, and they were tempting, despite our exhaustion. One particularly big boar, highest and furthest up from the river, was too tempting for me.
Already wet and tired, I left Brad, raft pulled up on a sandbar, in mid-afternoon. If I calculated correctly, I could climb the miles of swampy tundra, get up to the bear, kill and skin him, and return to the boat before dark. Ambitious. Probably foolish. Hours and miles later, drenched in sweat and swamp water, I was pressed against the edge of a steep, mossy ledge, watching the boar through my scope less than 200 yards upslope. He was feeding on blueberries just over the ridge, and I could only see the fur of his shoulders. The slope behind him looked cliffy, and I didn’t want him to fall down into a chasm, so I waited for another hour until he grazed his way out onto the open blueberry slope. My first shot hit the mark right behind the shoulder. He wheeled around and headed straight toward the cliffy precipice. I threw another shot after him but hit only rocks. My heart sank as I crested the ridge 10 minutes later. Nothing but cliffs and boulders down to the bottom of the chasm where I spotted a messy heap of black fur. I picked my way down the cliffs and assessed the damage. Hide torn in several places, back leg broken, and the top of the skull crushed badly. My biggest bear yet. Bittersweet.
It was nearly dark when I finally reached the raft, pack heavy with hide and broken skull. We pushed on downriver another mile before dragging out for the night. We didn’t feel rested the next morning, but with 10 miles to go and no time left, we pumped out the river water, loaded up, and pushed the one-ton floating slug back into the current. Few words were spoken that day as we made the final push to the haul-out, hefted all our gear, meat, and the emptied raft up the steep bank to an overgrown runway, and trudged the final steps to the little log cabin where we would stay the night. It was glorious. Wood stove, dry beds, pancake mix in the cupboard. The mental pressure of needing to make survival choices eased off. The hard push was over.
Several Cessna flights later, all of our gear and treasures landed in Anchorage, and we got busy with post-hunt logistics, despite the lingering soreness and exhaustion. Brad was finally recovering from sickness. I looked skeletal. The trip had been a mental and physical meat-grinder, even for two experienced hunters. “Work smarter, not harder.” It’s a nice saying until you find yourself with two dead bull moose two miles from camp in the Alaskan bush. Then you just work harder. Maybe there’s a more appropriate saying for this trip, “They were the victims of their own success.”
Alaska is amazing, truly one of the last wild places, and I will hunt there again as often as I am able, but when a friend asked if I would do a self-guided Alaskan moose hunt again, it did give me pause. I told him I’d need at least a couple years to forget the difficulty of it before I ramp up for that task again. However, that was months ago and my knees are almost working again. Even now, if the opportunity presented itself, I know I would go back for more. I’d oil my boots, set my teeth, dig deep, and take the bull by the horns.
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