The write up. First off, I am sooo hooked on Alaska. I've been dreaming of going to Alaska since I was 15 years old. This was my first trip and God willing it won't be my last one. I'm going to lay it all out there, the good the bad and the ugly. I have thought quite a bit about how to write this experience up. I want to be fair and honest in my assessment and not overly critical or sugar coat anything. Ryan was our outfitter for this hunt. Super nice guy, very good family man and works hard. I think if he did a couple of things different I could come on here and wholeheartedly recommend using him. I'm not sure I can do that, maybe as I think about it and reflect on the whole hunt more I can do that. So why wouldn't I jump on here and tell you to book that dream hunt with his company, after all I was successful, I did harvest a nice respectable bull. Lots of little things that start to add up. First and foremost as I'm sure some other guys who hunted with Ryan this fall will echo, it was ridiculously hard to communicate with him. I know he is SUPER busy, but he needs someone who can answer questions and stay on top of things from that side of the business. It's frustrating when you put a few thousand dollars down and can't get a response for several days or weeks. I had a couple of guys contact me via PMs asking if I knew how to get a hold of him because they had not spoken to him for weeks. His wife Angela was a bit more responsive for us and that did help. We arrived at Deadhorse Airport after a 2 hour delay in Anchorage and was meant by a guy named Jeff. He's another outfitter up there and was asked by Ryan to bring us down to the boat launch. We stopped by the General store on the way out of town. Minor issue here, I spent $75 to send up two 100 canisters of Jetboil Fuel, yet the General store had bigger canisters for $14 ea. Grrr. While at the General Store we meant up with some guys and soon a guy named Keith was driving us to the launch, Keith was just another hunter who was going with Jeff and had been up the year before. The Launch was 46 miles from Deadhorse, not 75 miles like the brochure said. I think things like this make me wonder if they want you to think you are farther in than you are. Maybe not, just a thought. We waited about 30 minutes at the launch. The Airbot ride was very cool, I'll post some videos once I get them uploaded to Youtube. We were surprised it could fit all of our gear and the camp gear and us in one load. Minor issue: Ryan was pretty unorganized at the launch with a bunch of gear that had been sent up by several different groups. Or as a former Military guy I'm being overly critical, but we ended up with a couple of items that were not ours and was offered a couple of items we did not request that I'm sure someone else would have been missing. We had about an hour boat ride, but no where near the miles up the Ivishak that we were told we would be going in. We ended up camping on the Echooka River. Awesome place, awesome camping spot. I found out later from the camp below us, which I could see from the knoll above camp, they had 4 Grizzlies run through camp their first night.
