"Little" Pathfinder's Alaska Caribou Hunt

[Pathfinder101]

You can’t “catch” a caribou: Between the muskeg, the tussocks, the streams and marshes everywhere and the distortion of distances on flat tundra, it is impossible to “catch up” to a caribou.  You have to basically hope they are feeding your way, or try to get in front of them before they make it to where you hope to intercept them.  Occasionally, you can catch one stationary and sneak up on them, but if they’re not bedded, chances are you will never get any nearer to them than you are.  A “feeding” caribou that is moving, is walking faster through the tussocks and muskeg than you can walk. If they’re moving out with a purpose, I don’t think there’s a landborne vehicle invented that could catch them in that stuff.  And they can cross a neck-deep marsh in 30 seconds that you can’t (and you won’t see them do it because of the flat topography- they just disappear for a few seconds and reemerge, and you won’t even know the marsh was there…).   

[Pathfinder101]

 The next morning we got up early, poked our heads out of the tent, and it was pouring and dense fog.  No point in going out in that, so we all went back to sleep.  About 7am, I awoke, hearing my sister’s voice taking quietly in their tent.  I could tell that the weather had broken and the sun was starting to come out.  As I was putting on my boots, I heard her tent unzip.  A second later I could hear her talking excitedly and gear being shuffled around.  When I poked my head out of the tent, I saw why.  A herd of 4 caribou, including a bull, was feeding 200 yards from the tents.  My sister and her husband were trying to get an angle on the bull for a shot, but the slight roll of the land had their bodies hidden, with only their heads visible.  I grabbed my tripod and shooting saddle from my gear and waddled out to her.  Still not high enough, so we squat waddled to the only clump of high ground, about 50 yards to our right.  She got set up on the rest, and two shots later we had her bull down.  He died 167 yards from her tent. 

[Pathfinder101]

From her shooting perch (a clump of tussocks and moss that was about 2 feet high), we could see across the west arm of the lake, a herd of about 7 or 8 animals, including two pretty good bulls.  They were feeding, and looked stationary.
I should have known better.
While my brother in law and sister started breaking down her bull, LP and I took off after the bulls.  Rounding the arm of the lake we got another look at them.  I ranged them at a little over 1000 yards.  Stationary.  Feeding.  15 minutes later we stopped to catch our breath after fighting through muskeg for several hundred yards.  I ranged them again.  Still stationary.  Still Feeding.  1000 yards. 
We played this game for the next two hours until they disappeared and we found ourselves about 2 miles from camp.  I had “relearned” the lesson I had already learned 9 years ago; you can’t catch caribou…  We never got closer to them than 1000 yards.  We stumbled back into camp around noon, soaked, starving and exhausted. 
After some Mountain House and a rest, we helped my sister pack her bull back to camp, then climbed the “ridge” near her carcass to survey the area.  The “ridge” was probably only 30 or 40 feet high, and didn’t offer us much of a view, but we got an idea of the topography and did spot some feeding caribou in the distance.  After watching them for a while, we decided they were heading in a different direction, so we hiked back to camp for dinner.

[Pathfinder101]

LP and I were heating up a Mountain House when I heard Shawn yelling “Hey Bear!”  Coming around the tent, we saw a sow grizzly with two cubs.  Again, too quick for a picture, but she stood up on her hind legs, looked at us, and then the three of them loped away.  They had only been about 300 yards from camp when Shawn spotted them.  Probably we figured, on the way to investigate my sister’s boned carcass and gut pile.
We had just finished eating (about 9 pm), when LP spotted a bull across the lake.  We set up the spotting scope and were sizing him up, when we spotted 3 more bulls off to our west.  And they were “kind of” headed our way.  Close enough for us to try to get in front of them.  So, LP, Shawn and I took off to try to cut them off. 
As we started to fight through the tussocks up the ridge we passed my sister’s bull’s gut pile.  It had been scattered and buried.  Yup.  That mamma grizzly hadn’t been on her way “to” the carcass.  She was on her way back from it when we saw her. 
Yes, we had been eating dinner and lounging in camp, with a grizzly and two cubs feeding on a carcass 167 yards away.  That’ll put some extra goosebumps on ya.

[Pathfinder101]

After climbing and angling down the ridge for a while, the bulls disappeared into a draw that we hadn’t seen before.  One bull was clearly larger than the other two, that was evident when they were all standing together.  When  we could see into the draw, they had all separated.  We located two of the bulls, and they were headed in different directions.  The good news was that the bigger of the two was still sort of angling towards us.  At about 500 yards (we think) he turned and started to head for a land bridge between the lake and a smaller lake north of us.  LP set up on the rest, put the clicks on his scope for 500 yards, and got ready to take the shot.
I say “we think” the bull was 500 yards, because we were having a devil of a time getting a range on him, due to the flat topography and the tussocks and bushes that he was feeding through.  After getting about a dozen ranges (that came up everywhere between 700 and 6.1 yards), we finally got a few readings that were more or less consistent at just over 500.  LP pulled his bug net off his face, got steady, and squeezed off a shot. 
A miss.
Could have been the range.  Could have been the bugs.  Could have been LP pulling the shot, I don’t know.  We couldn’t tell if it went high or low, but it was a clean miss.  Then the unexpected happened; the spooked bull must have thought the shot had come from a different direction, started running right towards us.  At about 350 yards, he stopped broadside and LP decided that was close enough for another shot.  Just as he steadied, the bull started walking again, so LP led him and squeezed off another round. 
“I had to have hit him that time.” He said.
But the bull showed no signs of being hit.  Except that he trotted another 100 yards closer in our direction. 
The next shot broke both of his shoulders.  He trotted a few yards (somehow?) and went down.  Hugs and high-fives for all. The only downside was that while walking up to LP’s bull, we spotted movement in the big draw that the bulls had initially disappeared into.  The biggest of the bulls trotted up on the ridge, over it, and off into oblivion.  He had been within rifle range the whole time.  We don’t know where.  Maybe bedded down in the brush, maybe hidden in some fold of topography that we couldn’t see.  LP had shot a decent bull, but unfortunately we had made a common mistake.  We had been so fixated on getting on the bull that we hadn’t really stopped and evaluated him again.  Caribou all look “big” on the hoof because they are a deer-sized animal will “elk sized” horns.  We had shot one of the smaller bulls in the group.  If they had all stayed together, we’d have clearly seen the difference, but looking at that bull by himself, 500 yards away, we thought he was the big one. 
When we walked up to him, we found the second shot had blown his windpipe out.  It must have happened when LP “led” him for the shot.  Funny that he hadn’t shown any signs of being hit.  If you blew my windpipe to shreds, I would at least give you the satisfaction of letting you know…

[Pathfinder101]

After a session of photos snapped violently between tearing off his headnet and when he couldn’t stand it any longer, LP and I started breaking down the bull while Shawn hiked back to camp for meat packs and reinforcements (my sister).  By the time they got back, we had the bull mostly quartered and ready to pack.  These photos were taken at midnight as we packed the bull back to camp.

[Pathfinder101]

Having two bulls on the ground really took the pressure off.  To be honest, the two most important bulls were down.  Shawn said that all he really cared about was my sister getting her bull.  I killed a big bull when I took my older son 9 years ago, and I had decided that I was only going to kill one if I saw one bigger than the one I already had.  We were running short on time, and although we were welcome to extend our stay, it would have required changing plane tickets and me missing work.   
The next morning, while I was skinning out the skulls of the two bulls we had down, Shawn spotted a couple of really good bulls in about the same place as the bulls the night before.  He and my sister took off to get in front of them.  LP and I watched through the spotter from camp.  After a while, we saw them pop up on the tundra.  The bulls were working towards them and disappeared.  Then they all disappeared.  Then the bulls popped back up.  From our perspective, it looked like the bulls were standing right where the hunters had been standing a few minutes before (that was an optical illusion, they were actually several hundred yards different).
“What’s going on?” LP hissed from behind his binoculars “Why isn’t he shooting?!!”
Just right then, while he was looking at the bull through the binos, he saw the bull drop.  A half second later we heard the shot.  Big bull down!

[Pathfinder101]

We grabbed packs and made a beeline for their location, a little over a mile away.  We located a game trail along the lake that made the hiking a little bit easier, until we got about 200  yards from where they were processing the bull.  The trail led right through a huge marsh. 
“You can’t go around it.” Shawn yelled  “It’s a stream between the two lakes.  Try to find a place to cross that’s only waist deep”
Not realizing it, he had shot the bull on an “island” of sorts.  The 200 yards that he had shot across, wasn’t tundra, it was a swamp.  The bull dropped on dry ground, but it was the only dry ground near it.  It was a great bull though, the biggest one of the trip. 
LP and I slogged through the waist deep marsh for the last 200 yards.  It took us nearly 15 minutes.
Helping Shawn break down his bull, we discussed what to do.  200 yards of waist deep swamp with 60 lb meat packs was not an appealing prospect.  LP solved our problem.
“We don’t have to get the bull back to camp.” He said “We only have to get him to the bank of the lake.  The plane has floats.  I’ll see if there’s a path to get to the lake.”
And he trotted off on a recon.  A half hour later he was back.  He had found a route that would keep us dry all the way to the bank of the lake we were camped on.  So we loaded up packs and cached everything on the lake bank, praying that the swamp would keep a grizzly from discovering it until we could get picked up.

[Pathfinder101]

That night, Trace messaged and asked if we wanted to be left out for a few more days so I could get a bull.  He said he could change our flights for us and it wouldn’t be a problem.  I declined.  As I said earlier, I had already killed a trophy caribou, and dealing with any more than 3 carcasses on the flight home, plus another head was only something I wanted to do if I saw a huge one.  The weather was scheduled to be nasty the next day, but clear up that evening, so we figured we could probably expect a pickup by 6 or 7 that night.  If I killed something before then, I would message them and deal with it, but only if it was a spectacular bull that was worth inconveniencing everyone involved. 

[Pathfinder101]

That evening we decided that the meat had aged long enough for a feast.  One of PathfinderJR’s favorite memories from our hunt in 2016 was cooking caribou steaks over a twig fire on the last night of the hunt.  I had resolved to make sure LP had the same experience.  We took the tenderloins from my sister’s bull, and a couple of steaks off LP’s bull.  I had brought one of those handheld grills that you can buy in the camping section of Walmart.  We seasoned and clamped the steaks in the grill, built a twig fire and roasted them medium rare. 
Best.
Steaks.
Ever.

[Pathfinder101]

 

[Pathfinder101]

I hunted the next day, but it turned out that bull never showed up.  We saw a lot of bulls that day (looked like the migration was really starting to heat up), but none were bigger than the one I have on my wall, and none came close enough to tempt me out of the standard I had set.
We did have to chase the mamma grizzly out of camp again.  She showed up that afternoon at the top of the ridge, cubs in tow.  Not acting aggressive or anything, just stood up on her hind legs and looked to see if we were still there I think.  We yelled “hey Bear” a few times and she loped off, in the direction of LP’s gut pile.  From the direction she was running, I don’t think she could have missed the scent line, and we didn’t see her again, so I assume she found it and camped out there until she was satisfied.
If I had elected to stay a few more days, I am sure that a big bull would have wandered into a place that I could have killed him.  I think Trace would have been happier to say that his hunters had gone 4 for 4.  But for me, I was happy that my son, my sister and my hunting buddy all got bulls they were happy with, and we had a successful trip. Between last year’s elk and the huge bears that LP keeps killing every year (another one the day before yesterday here in the Blues) another bull would have just created a worse “taxidermy problem” for me than I already have.

[Pathfinder101]

Ron got us and our meat (two trips total) back to Deadhorse by 9 pm, with our flight leaving early the next morning.  So that night was a flurry of packing meat (which we brought home as checked luggage), putting the heads on a pallet to ship, and repacking all our gear for the flight home.  Oh, and laundry.  Gobs of swamp-soaked laundry. 

[Pathfinder101]

The next morning was also a flurry of getting everything shipped and checking in at the airport, and boarding for the long flight home.

[Pathfinder101]

All three hunters decided that they wanted euro mounts, with the velvet left on.  We sent the heads to a taxidermist in Anchorage for that.  We brought the meat home in wax freezer boxes, and the sheds in a bicycle shipping box.  I made it home in time to start work the next day, exhausted, but happy. 
All-in-all, it was a great hunt.  A once in a lifetime experience for my son, sister and her husband.  Got to experience things that I had not experienced on my last Alaska caribou hunt, but I think we got the full Alaska experience this time.  Muskeg, tussocks, bugs, grayling, musk ox, the migration, tundra, the Brooks Range, shed-hunting-Nirvana, Lake Trout, velvet bulls and grizzlies.