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Thought some might like to read one hunter's extended opinion, This appeared in SPORTS AFIELD a couple of years ago:

ALASKA AND AFRICA

We�d hiked two miles from camp that morning, a slightly uphill walk over the terrain known by the deceptively gentle name of �tundra.� The three of us (a young guide named Zach and his two older clients) then sat on a hill all day and glassed an open Alaskan valley for bears. We saw one late in the afternoon, eating blueberries near the northern rim of the valley. There weren�t many blueberries so the bear kept moving and eating, a busy little particle of black against the pale green of the tundra. As we watched a bank of low clouds eased over the ridge and the bear disappeared.
Soon the clouds covered half the valley and Zach said, �Let�s head back to camp.� We nodded, then stood and lifted our packs and rifles, starting toward the two tiny tents along the creek. The slightly downhill hike should have been easier than coming up, but one of the interesting things about tundra is that uphill or downhill doesn�t much matter. The incline is never steep since tundra is essentially a very shallow swamp, and doesn�t grow on hillsides. It�s a combination of miniature hills and valleys, the hills about as stable as a sleeping Labrador retriever, and the valleys just big enough to accommodate a hunting boot, so every step means lifting your foot high enough to step over a sleeping Labrador. Performing this Lab-step repeatedly while carrying 35 pounds of pack and rifle is a good aerobic workout, even when technically traveling downhill.
Consequently, by the time the low clouds overtook us and started to leak raindrops we were all sweat-drenched. Zach would stop every few hundred yards so his older dudes could breathe for a couple of minutes. During one of these �rests� I silently came to the conclusion that being wet and tired in wilderness wasn�t quite as much fun as it had been when I wasn�t, uh, middle-aged.
The rain continued throughout the night. This might not seem to be good for middle-aged men who have to leave a small tent more frequently than they did when younger, but the rain kept the mosquitoes at bay. As I lay in my sleeping bag after one midnight trip, listening to raindrops on thin nylon and the gentle snoring of my hunting partner (who�d plugged his ears against my not-so-gentle snoring) I was comforted by the knowledge that in less than a year I�d be in a country called Tanzania during the dry season, sleeping in a tent big enough to stand up in.
Not all the moments in that spike camp were semi-miserable. As late summer neared early autumn the mosquitoes disappeared, and I actually don�t mind eating freeze-dried food. In two weeks of hunting I got a nice black bear with Zach, and a nice grizzly with another guide named Bryce. Both were good guys and we never ran out of things to talk about, and even when we weren�t seeing bears (which was most of the time) occasional caribou passed through to remind us that yes, we were in Alaska, with no fences or roads inside the sphere of our simple existence.
It�s also hard to beat finally spotting a grizzly bear feeding in a meadow a mile away, making a long stalk through a maze of spruce trees to the edge of the meadow, then finally standing there and seeing the dark hump of the bear above the cured autumn grass, close enough to hit with a thrown rock. And then kneeling and waiting, the rifle seeming as light as a flying raven, while the hump moved through the grass to the edge of a shallow pond, and finally the bear easing out of the tall grass, so dark that it seemed to be part of the subarctic earth. The scope found the bear�s shoulder, and a tiny voice inside me said, �Well, let�s see what happens now.�
Then there was the bear running back through the long grass, and more shots, and finally everything so deeply quiet except for my own long exhalation, as if something had left me too, just as it had left the bear lying very still in the meadow.
The oddity was that almost as soon as the bear was skinned and the hide and skull packed back to our tiny tent, a Super Cub landed to begin my long journey back into civilization--first to a night at Stoney River Lodge with real food and a hot shower, and then onward toward Los Anchorage, and a motel and phone calls and jet planes. It was while falling asleep in the motel that I somehow started thinking about Cape buffalo in Botswana.
Hunting buffalo in the Okavango didn�t much resemble hunting grizzlies in Alaska. The nights lasted much longer, and instead of lying inside a sleeping bag listening to the hissing patter of light rain there was the sudden call of a leopard, so much like the hoarse, vibrant push of a crosscut saw through a hardwood board. Instead of wind in the alders there was the crack and crash of branches as elephants ripped an unfortunate tree apart. Instead of spending 18 hours a day watching Alaskan scenery and not much else, there was almost always some wildlife in sight, whether a herd of impala, vervet monkeys in sausage trees, or a lion rising out of his grass bed.
Unlike grizzlies, Cape buffalo live in herds, sometimes small and sometimes large. One day a herd of over 1000 grazed along a mile of riverbank, the herd creating its own cloud of African dust, and instead of an occasional black raven flying against a gray cloud, the pale dust-cloud was alive with white egrets.
The sheer quantity of buffalo presented a pleasant, tense problem, and we spent most of one morning easing into parts of the long herd, the dust drifting into our faces and filling our nostrils with the gentle scent of cattle and a hint of desert. Once, late in the morning, we slowly worked our way into a peninsula of thornbush, ending up at the tip of the peninsula surrounded on three sides by buffalo. Some had already bedded in the warm sun, so close we could hear them chew their cud like horned Angus in a Montana pasture, while others seemed to stand there and look around with a decidedly non-Angus squint.
We stood hidden with our heads close together so we could whisper. One bull was the biggest we�d seen yet, the tips of his horns rising into a �-curl much like the horns of a young bighorn ram, but through our binoculars we could see coarse hair growing in the gap between the bosses of those wide horns. Russell turned and whispered, eyebrows full of pale dust from the buffalo-cloud, that the bull was too young. I nodded, and we slowly backed out of the peninsula. When we were a few hundred yards away, heading for the Land Cruiser to eat lunch, one end of the herd started bellowing, and we turned and looked back, seeing a much higher dust-cloud rise as some panicked buffalo ran into the next bunch of buffalo, starting a chain-reaction that eventually had a mile of buffalo bellowing and kicking so much dust into the pale blue sky that we only occasionally glimpsed black particles of buffalo at the edges of the cloud.
Jonathan, the young tracker, climbed a nearby acacia and, from the fork of the trunk 10 feet above us, said, �Lions.�
He climbed another tree later that day, after the herd had split into smaller herds of �only� 200 to 300 buffalo. We were easing through a palm island toward one of those herds when we spotted the horn-bosses of an old bull bedded in the grass, 40 yards ahead. Jonathan climbed silently up a palm, then silently climbed back down and hand-signaled that one of the horns was broken.
A little later we walked bent over through tall grass, stalking the herd. Halfway through the long grass something large jumped in front of us, a flash of barely-seen yellow slightly darker than the grass, and the rifles went to our shoulders, our reflexes thinking �lion.� And then a big hyena ran out of the long grass, and we watched, half-crouched, as the herd of buffalo watched as the hyena run, luckily away from them.
With so many buffalo there eventually had to come the moment when the front sight settled on the shoulder of an old bull, and a silent voice again said, �Well, let�s see�.� At the shot there was the same rush of a big shoulder-shot animal, this time magnified by 250 other big animals panicked by the sound of a big rifle, and the sound of more shots and then eventually another odd moment of silence as I finally exhaled and the dust of the now-gone herd began to settle, with the old bull lying on the cropped grass near the shallow river.
So which is better, a sleeping bag in a tent just the right height for third-graders, and freeze-dried food in a northern wilderness so harsh that it�s almost empty of wildlife, or a wall tent with a real bed and full bathroom, and four-course meals with South African wine in the middle of an open-air zoo? To the average urban American the choice would be obvious, but to a hunter it is not. I made my first trip to both Alaska and to Africa almost 20 years ago, and ever since have made sure that my visits to each remain even. Right now Alaska is ahead by one. To a hunter luxury is nice now than then, but more important is wondering what will happen next.
That is the real question in hunting, because unlike golf or hiking, hunting leads us to unexpected places. Wild animals do not live in numbered forests where we know exactly where to find them: �Number 14 is the famous Brown Bear Hole. It isn�t a long shot, so a .375 with 300-grain bullets will carry to the green.� Wild animals don�t live along groomed trails, so we have to wander off the path, along the way discovering something about ourselves, whether hunting grizzlies or caribou or Cape buffalo or kudu.
Alaska is more of a test of sheer physical endurance. Neither hiking tundra nor climbing mountains is easy, especially when rain, swamps, rockslides or devil�s club are part of the deal. My trips to Alaska often remind me of a story about Theodore Roosevelt told by one of his hunting partners. While on a hunt somewhere in the North American wilderness they were caught in a thunderstorm, and Roosevelt galloped along on his horse grinning and shouting his famous, �Bully! Bully!� while the rain dripped off his spectacles and lightning crashed. Most of us are not quite so masochistic, but on many Alaskan hunts there comes a point where it�s necessary to shout bully, even if silently.
Africa�s wildlife, whether elephants or mosquitoes, can kill us in more ways, though usually in very pleasant surroundings. We can be strolling in our hiking shorts on the level sand between acacias, gazing at bright birds in the sunlight and looking forward to lunch, when we accidentally walk too close to a cow elephant, a mamba or a bull buffalo that�s still mad at the lion that scratched him last night. Despite grizzly bears, the landscape and weather of Alaska are far more likely to kill us than any bear. Our Super Cub might plow into a mountain or we might drown in a river, but unless we act like Timothy Treadwell we aren�t likely to end up inside a grizzly.
The hassles of travel are about equal. If we live in North America the flight to Africa is longer, and we end up jet-lagged. But we have to take a lot more luggage to Alaska, and even if we follow the outfitter�s list exactly, he�ll still complain that we brought too much. Both trips will normally involve one or two overnights before we really get there.
These days some of Africa resembles a zoological Disneyland, especially parts of South Africa, where you�re likely to find gemsbok in tropical jungle and red lechwe wandering the desert, with no dangerous animals except behind high fences. Far more of Alaska is still really wild, thanks to very few people, but it�s also less foreign. While downtown King Salmon may not match New York City�s restaurants, it�s a lot more like rural South Dakota than Maun, Botswana, where the suburbs are thatched-roof huts surrounded by corrals made of thornbush to keep leopards from eating the goats.
You�re more likely to come back from Alaska without the animal you sought, whether a grizzly or a Dall sheep, than return from Africa without a Cape buffalo or a kudu. If you do get something in Alaska, you�ll often end up packing part of it out yourself. I�ve stood on an Alaskan creekbank with a big chunk of caribou on my back, looking up at the high ridge between me and camp, wishing I could fly. I�ve also waded into a salmon river to tie a rope onto the antler of a bull moose, with only the tip of one antler visible above the water, because that�s where the moose decided to die. In Africa there�ll be plenty of hands to get the game out. Once seven of us loaded a bull eland into a tiny Toyota pickup, then rode with the eland back to the skinning shed. The pickup didn�t move very fast, but then again Africa really is timeless.
The truth is that wild Alaska and wild Africa are separate but equal peaks in the hunter�s life. They�ll both ask who we are, though in different ways and even different languages. Neither is anything like hunting whitetails from a treestand, and though we�re being guided, we still must be aware of everything almost all the time, or we might not make it home. And in both places there will be plenty of moments when we silently ask, �Well, let�s see what happens now�.�

Very good. Enjoyed that very much.

Very good read, maybe one day I'll get to one of them.

yes...very nice....thanks John......

Sincerely, excellent John.

Bob

www.bigbores.ca

What an objective article. I really enjoyed it and look forward to the day when I can hunt a moose or a caribou in Alaska, or just a white tail in NA. Well, let's see what happens...

I've never hunted Alaska but hope to one day before I get too old. I enjoyed the article very much and can only opine they are two very different places. In my view Alaska presents a much higher challenge to the hunter, with weather and terrain a big component and also the living conditions are significantly tougher as well. Still, if I had to make an "either or" choice, I think I would choose Africa and for the record, when I say "Africa", I do not include ranch hunting in RSA. jorge

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John,

Many thanks for posting that excellent piece of writing and marvelous perspective.

It's a big world with many great adventures available. I feel blessed to have hunted in many states in the U. S., including my recent trip to Alaska. I've fond memories of several hunts in Scotland, one trip to Germany, and another to Kyrgyzstan. My first trip to Africa comes next May. It's all good (and different)! If I've done anything wrong, it would be making too many hunts in Scotland when I could have done a few other things. Perhaps I got into a rut there, but it was most enjoyable. Maybe it was a groove rather than a rut?

John,

That piece is so good, you need to post it on your website.

Thanks for sharing.

DF

Good post, John, and very true.

I did most of my Alaska hunting while still a relatively young man- it was much easier to hike the mountains for Dall sheep, endure the Aleutians for a brown bear, and withstand late season hunts for caribou near the Alaska range.

I saved Africa for the 'second half'- and glad I did.

Just superb. Thank you. Captures my experiences exactly.

Beset line in the whole story. Like it!

John, I do believe that 's the first piece of "glossy mag" prose by you that I've ever read. It's quite good, dare I say Ruarkesque?

Cheers,
Pete

Terrific piece, and mirrors my perspective and thoughts wonderfully. Thanks a bunch for the post. MARK

Well, I've been to Alaska 14 times now, I think, but never to Africa. I just turned 60 in July. I guess it's time to look at the Dark Continent.....finally.

Good read! As a livestock guy, I've never contemplated "horned" Angus cattle. Fun imagery.

Good article MD

Speaks to the nature of the hunter in us.
Randy

Well I look at hunting in Alaska vs Africa as the difference between flying airplanes vs helicopters. Airplanes are stable and pretty much fly themselves most of the time, while helicopters are unstable and you physically have to make them fly. You can fly airplanes in reasonable comfort, while flying helicopters is just plain uncomfortable hard work. Both are just plan fun for the pilot. Alaska is different hunting experience from Africa, not better or worst just different. The same goes for Africa, you can make a hunt as hard or as easy as you want with in reason. Walking on Tundra is what it is, Walking in rift valley is what it is, one has a mosquito problem some times of the year while the other has the same mosquito problem and other bugs and some really bad snakes to step on at times. The thing is I you have the chance go to both places, then do so. Live it to short, and to ask yourself what if?

John enjoyed it! you have gift my friend!, my dream to go to at least one of these places before im gone! not looking good but still hopeful!