Gringo's Spring Ak Bear Hunt

[Gringo31]

Earlier this year, I had talked to my brother about doing a spring bear hunt in SE Alaska.  He is a resident there and we started the planning process.  The most difficult thing with spring bear hunting is timing.  If you come too early, you may not see any bear.....but the ones you do see should all have great coats.  If you come late, lots of bear but lots of rubs.  In the end, we ended up just picking a date that we thought would be about right.  I've hunted black bear up here before around this time and can say that this years spring appears to be 3 weeks behind.  Some of the same areas in years past had 2 feet tall grass on the beach and today their might be 5 inches.

Anyway, this is the second brown bear tag I've ever purchased.  Tag and licence put a guy back $585 plus your airfare.  The one good thing is that if your tag goes unpunched, you can come back in the fall or use it for anything of equal or lesser value which is nice.  So....I got the time off of work, came up here a few days early to get everything ready.  We bought our tags, registered for the areas we were going to hunt and loaded his boat to the hilt with just about everything you could imagine.  Crab pots, shrimp pots, propane, food, rifles, my bow, pack frames, raft and of course a little Alaskan Amber.

We left the harbor Saturday afternoon and started on our way glassing the beaches the whole way but no bear were to be seen.  Caught a meal plus worth of crab in about half an hour and looked forward to the days to come.  Weather was beautiful!  (more to come, got to see if I can find a way to download pics, I don't have the normal cord with me from my phone...)

stay tuned.

[Austrian Hunter]

Come on, hurry up!  I like the beginning!!

[Gringo31]

This thread is going to be picture heavy (you've been warned )

As I said, BEAUTIFUL weather and here are some pics as we left the harbor.

[mulehunter]

Damn.  I wish I could go.


Have great time.

Mulehunter

[Gringo31]

The amount of scenery that Alaska has to offer is stunning.  It keeps me coming back time and time again.  I saw whales, bear, sea otters, mountain goats and even a moose.  I'm not sure I'd want to deal with that much rain or the LONG winters.....Here are a some pics from the water as we went on our way out.

[Gringo31]

We holed up for the night not seeing anything but had us a crab feed.  We set off for a particular area that we knew had promise but the downside was that anchoring up at this place could be a bit tricky.  We get there and set off to do some hard glassing and look for tracks.  Just off of the beach within the first 5 min we cut an older track that while it wasn't real big, was encouraging.  Then on to glassing...







We saw a PILE of deer at this spot.  I think we counted just shy of 30 in an hour and a half.  We were watching them close hoping they would tip us off on a brown in the area.

[Gringo31]

I'm not sure how much ground we covered, but we didn't see ANY tracks (bear tracks) in all of our hiking and glassing that we did.  We called it a night, BBQ'd a steak and called it a night.



We got up in the morning and weren't doing too much, scrambling some eggs and I look out the window only to see this guy



and another of the same bear



ALAS, we found our first brownie!  Fact is that while I think I'm decent at judging black bears, these browns throw me a few curves.  Our difficulty was how do we load our gear, get on the raft and get to shore without the bear on the beach right across from us knowing what is up.  This bear looked good enough that I would not have hesitated.  Then....you get the other ideas running through your head about whether or not you take the bow or the rifle....

Well, as it turns out, we didn't end up with too much of a choice, about the 3rd time I opened the back door of the boat, it finally had enough and bolted into the brush not to be seen again.  Now the question was whether or not to stick around in this area, knowing we just saw what we thought was a decent bear (yet wondering if it was the same bear from the only track we saw in the area which wasn't real impressive).  When we talked about all our options, the lack of general sign was enough for us to move on to another area.

So...
Day 1 Saturday afternoon zero bear
Day 2 Sunday zero bear
Morning of day 3 saw a bear and decided to move on....

As we left, we again started glassing the shoreline and we then found this guy



I let him walk and notice the lack of green anywhere on the beach.  This bear was eating kelp of some sorts and DID NOT appreciate me lip squeaking at him.  He had no idea I was there, I took a lot of pics of him, got bored and decided to play with him some, lip squeaked and he looked my way once and bolted.

[Gringo31]

Later that afternoon, we were checking out a new area and saw these guys



To ME (and I'm not good at this) but I called this a sow and a yearling cub.  We watched them for quite awhile to see if a big boar would show up....no dice.  We went to another area....more and more glassing and I had my first encounter with the Alaska State Troopers (aka Johnny Law Dog  )

It is impressive the way they just drop in on ya.....he was a real nice guy that checked our licenses and tags and did clarify something for us that frankly may have gotten us in trouble.  Because my brother is a resident, I don't need to have a guide.  The wording is "non-residents who hunt brown bear must be accompanied in the field by an Alaska-licensed guide or an Alaska resident 19 years or older who is within the second degree of kindred".  Well......I suppose the question we had was what does "accompanied in the field" mean?  We both assumed that we had to be hunting together and that he couldn't be at his house and turn me loose.  This trooper let us know that if were were hunting and I said "I'll go this way, you go that and we'll meet up over there in an hour" that we would be in violation.  This includes the scenario where I took a raft or a skiff to shore with him on the bigger boat to shoot a bear.  He would have to be next to me or as he said "within 100 feet".  Well, that ruled out one of the tactics that we may have considered trying.....so my brother made a call to a buddy and he met us the next morning where his buddy could then run the boat should we go ashore and he wouldn't have to bother anchoring up.  Total bear seen Day 3 was 6.

[Michelle_Nelson]

Your killing me!  Those are some nice pictures.

[dontgetcrabs]

Very cool Gringo.

[Jason]

Great pics!

[windygorge]

how do you hunt them without a guide??  the tag fees i can handle, the guide fees i can't.  please let me know.  it would be a dream

[TeacherMan]

I'm going out of Whittier next week for 5 days on a 40' boat, I cant wait! Where did you launch out of? There will be 5 of us, thats a lot of black bear tags, 

[Machias]

 

[denali]

Great photos and story so far Gringo, can't wait to see more