My Hunting Stories
It looks like I’m not going to make it on a brown bear hunt this spring. Two of my bear hunting partners, Jared and Nate, just welcomed two new precious additions to our family, three month old Macy and two month old Wesley and, Nathan, who is in college, is just finishing up his spring semester, so they are unable to go. In my last story I forecasted a spring brown bear hunt but naturally all of these wonderful changes take precedence. As we all know the only constant in life is change
I have never written a story specifically about how to hunt the different species but have written about how I personally have hunted them. Years ago, I gave talks about how to hunt Dall sheep during “Sheep Days” at the Alaska Chapter of The Foundation for North American Wild Sheep (FNAWS), now known as the Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF). Those talks were well received so I hope this story will be as well.
Back in the late summer of 1979 my friend and local taxidermist Brent Jones asked me if I wanted to go brown bear hunting that fall with him and another friend of his, Dwight Felmlee. I jumped at the offer. I had hunted sheep with Brent in ’74 and had been hanging around his taxidermy shop in my spare time. Brent was a super hunter with an Assistant Guide License so I felt like it would be a great hunt. We were going to hunt in the Cold Bay area and I had never been that far down the Alaska Peninsula.
Back in 2005 when I retired from the guide business, the Mulchatna caribou herd was crashing. I had guided for them through the peak which topped out at about 250,000 caribou. It dropped to an estimated 80,000 or so and finally dropped on down to about 60,000. Those caribou hunts were by far the most fun hunting experiences that I have ever had and I have always wanted all of my grandchildren to have that experience.
As hunters we all have our favorite spots where we have taken some of our biggest or best trophies. Some just call it their secret spot while others may call it “the honey hole” or by some other name. Guides have their favorites also and in AAA’s early days our “honey hole” for big brown bears was Barney Creek, a small alder filled valley with a southern exposure in our Cold Bay area. The valley was almost four miles long but we never killed or stalked a bear in the last mile of it. We did take quite a few bears on the north entrance to the valley. It was mainly a breeding or hook-up valley. We only hunted it in the spring and during eight springs, we harvested eleven bears over 9’ with seven of those over 10’ and one 11 footer. We also know of a King Cove resident who took his brother to this valley and they harvested two bears over 10’during that same time period. Now that’s what I call a “honey hole.”
