Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska DIY Caribou

I would guess most avoided all "big" ones and looked for all good-eating critters.

Recently read Alaska is considering banning NR from DIY caribou hunting. Any truth to that?

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Yes. Its the first thing they do to control harvest numbers. Unfortunately IMHO if its an issue of needing less harvest EVERYONE should be in a drawing, not just NR or not just NR banned. If its bad it doesn't matter who kills. It matters the numbers.

Its going to be unit by unit or sub unit type of thing but it well could happen. They have done it for sheep in our unit. But R can hunt and kill all they want. No draw needed. Makes about zero sense.

OTOH the caribou are in a big downswing most areas. And they need less pressure at the moment overall.

Sheesh, our NR draw hunt in Unit 13 a few years ago looks better and better! SU 35 and I had a blast on that one!

There is a proposal before the Board of Game for consideration in March and it will restrict NRs for the roadside caribou hunts of the 40 Mile Herd.
There is other controversy in the Kotzebue area that I haven't followed.

Caribou across North America are suffering and hunting is impacted on may herds.

I was a "subsistance" hunter. out of Kotzebue. Did my share on "preserving the herd" by shooting pregnant cows per reg.

Them bald bulls were on their own after rut was over- mid November, until legal Feb 1... not that I'm admitting to anything against insane regulations, mind you.

Spagetti burger is pretty much all the same, I'd guess.

I miss being a "subsistence" hunter in GMU 23...

It sounds like the Caribou, Dall Sheep and King/Chinook salmon numbers are currently all down. The demand for subsistence is going up. No? I bet those meetings held by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game regarding hunting/fishing subsistence get right sporty! Never mind the regular board of game and board of fisheries meetings.

In 1979 me and some other guys briefly spoke to an old Sourdough in Talkeetna. He was visiting his daughter there. I remember him telling us that he came back to Alaska after World War One and that Alaska is now ruined forever and overcrowded. Over the years I have wished that we would have spent the entire day with him to hear his stories of Alaska. I'm guessing he was in his late eighties or early nineties then. Anyway, this poem reminds me of him.



The Heart of the Sourdough
by Robert W. Service

There where the mighty mountains bare their fangs unto the moon,
There where the sullen sun-dogs glare in the snow-bright, bitter noon,
And the glacier-glutted streams sweep down at the clarion call of June.

There where the livid tundras keep their tryst with the tranquil snows;
There where the silences are spawned, and the light of hell-fire flows
Into the bowl of the midnight sky, violet, amber and rose.

There where the rapids churn and roar, and the ice-floes bellowing run;
Where the tortured, twisted rivers of blood rush to the setting sun —
I've packed my kit and I'm going, boys, ere another day is done.


I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring wings;
It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure, it's the lure of the timeless things,
And to-night, oh, God of the trails untrod, how it whines in my heart-strings!

I'm sick to death of your well-groomed gods, your make-believe and your show;
I long for a whiff of bacon and beans, a snug shakedown in the snow;
A trail to break, and a life at stake, and another bout with the foe.

With the raw-ribbed Wild that abhors all life, the Wild that would crush and rend,
I have clinched and closed with the naked North, I have learned to defy and defend;
Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out — yet the Wild must win in the end.

I have flouted the Wild. I have followed its lure, fearless, familiar, alone;
By all that the battle means and makes I claim that land for mine own;
Yet the Wild must win, and a day will come when I shall be overthrown.

Then when as wolf-dogs fight we've fought, the lean wolf-land and I;
Fought and bled till the snows are red under the reeling sky;
Even as lean wolf-dog goes down will I go down and die.

Yeah we went pretty far north due to the changes with areas being closed . Overall a good trip, but hard to roll the dice on what will happen. I get protecting the resource, but seems very unfair to people that booked a year out. Just my opinion anyway.