Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Hold for air....

I'm a mite busy and internet is all funny again...so this will be in installments. Stay tuned. Re: the title- my rifle is zeroed for 300 yards...

Last week of Oct we got snow- well a few inches- enough for tundra running on snow machine. Moose season reopened Nov. 1, either sex sans calves or cows with calves. Caribou had been stacking up across the Sound for weeks, ;but not yet crossing the ice (How the hell do they know????) So I went moose hunting via snowmachine. Plan was to run 10 mile down the Norvik trail and hang a left into the rough country, then work back toward town.

3 miles out I begin glassing every half mile or so. At 6 miles out, I spotted 100 or so caribou 2 miles off the trail. They were crossing! Worked my way around thru low ground out of sight until I topped a ridge about a half mile
away. The bou I'd first spotted were on an adjacent ridge - down below in the flats yo the left were a mere 900 or so more... Not wanting to spook them with motor noise, I motored a couple hundred yards farther down, sky-lined, until I chickened out and abandoned the machine, still out of range of the Leopold 800si rangefinder - good to 500 yds or so on animals - my shooting range. I picked a prefered shooting position farther down on the crest of my ridge at a patch of brush (hopefully for a rest, and cover) so I walked a ways bent over, rifle overhead vertically simulating a caribou, I hoped (still sky-lined) down an existing snow machine track until the rf registered 397. Do-able ( I'm good to 500 ), but I figured on closer- to the mentioned brush. So I dropped off to the right the into a swale below- which still left me exposed to those 100 or so first sighted animals. In position, I started back up-slope toward the brush patch and was halfway there when the bedded animals all got up and everything began milling. Then a group of 60 or so (on the right of the pic) broke into a run toward me, passing on the crest of the opposing ridge across the swale to my right at about 150 yards - mostly just backs exposed, some openings, but all running. No shot.

The remainder started moving more slowly toward the left, and down toward the main group on the flat below. I hustled up to the crest, but still short by 50 yards or so of my brush pick, and assumed a sitting position, estimated range 300 yards to the nearest animals.