Had to get some firewood cut, but I'm tired of that now so I can work on this a little more.
We get to setting the camp, check the zero on the rifles, a little scouting close to camp and glassing for the rest of the day.
**The game plan on this trip was to be dropped off as high as we could on the river and still be able to float. We would be concentrating on caribou in the upper area and stay in one location for the 1st 6 days. I had a mid-hunt meat pick-up scheduled with Wright, which was not an easy thing to coordinate. The area we picked was pretty far from Fairbanks and we chose our dates based on another groups trip so that our mid hunt meat pick up was on the back flight for their drop off. Then we would float and hunt moose for the next 10 days, with our drop off point being 112 miles below our put in. There was one small change as the river bar landing strip had washed out the previous year and the new one was farther downstream making our total float 130 miles long.**
In the evening we were glassing and around 8pm we saw our 1st 3 moose, a bull and 2 cows! This was a great thing as not one of us, 5 sets of eye including the pilots had seen a single hair the whole flight in. We went to bed excited that night! Up the next morning, getting dressed, eating and glassing we see 3 moose! I believe they were different from the night before as we saw 1 small bull, 1 cow and 1 possible shooter (possible shooters for us are legal bulls 50+ or 4 brows
) They were well over 1-1/2 miles away as the moose the night before they were only 5-600 yards in a different direction. At this point I was stoked! I mean there aren't supposed to be very many moose up where we are, whats it going to be like 50 miles down river?!?
We split up and I never saw that moose again that day, I tried calling and one of the guys decided to follow them into the timber (or what they call timber in the tundra
)
4 hours later he was within 75yards of the bigger bull but he just wasn't sure it was 50" so he let it go, for the rest of the trip I think he regretted that, as the trip wet on that moose kept getting bigger.
Later in the day my partner Kyle and I set up on the rivers edge and called, we sat for 5-6 hours and it was getting later in the afternoon but it was staying light till almost 9pm, there was still time. I suddenly spotted a bull moose well over a mile away and he looked good enough to get closer look, so off we went. It was tough to keep tabs on him, we were in the open and he was bedded in the trees on the upper side of a timbered ridge. If we weren't straight on we couldn't see him, so we would make tracks for a while and then creep back into the line of sight to make sure he was still bedded. I checked him at about 700 yards and he was still bedded and looked legal, the wind was right and I picked a location that I thought would be 3-400 yards from him to try and verify he was legal. Well, I got lost
, everything looks the same up there.
I never found the exact location I was trying to get to, but I did find the bull and a cow, he was up and feeding but not really moving and was at 418 yards, definitely do-able for me, but I needed a better look at the spread. There was one more ridge between the bull and I and that would have given me a clear view and a 300 yard shot, less than a minute later I was there and he wasn't
I still don't know what happened, he was just gone, wind was good, he couldn't have seen or heard me.
Kyle and I made the 3+/- mile trip back to camp in the dark, an exciting 2nd day to say the least.
