Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Caribou Hunting - location and Outfitter recommendations

A group of friends and I are looking to do an Alaskan Caribou hunt this fall and was wondering where people would recommend going initially, and then who they would recommend using to get them there. We are looking to do a self-guided hunt, probably 7-10 days to spend hunting. Thank you in advance for any information you can share.

How many people in your party?

Currently we are thinking 4. There are a couple of additional friends still on the fence, so it could be as many as 6, but more than likely it will ultimately end up being 4.

Get ahold of Brooks Range Aviation in Bettles, they've got a couple of Beavers and an Otter. They could put your entire group in the Otter but you would have to be put on a lake somewhere since it's on floats. Not sure if they have a Beaver on wheels but I know they have a turbo Beaver on floats.

If your willing to spend a little cash, you could hire a hunt planner to set this all up for you. I know a good one in Fairbanks if you're interested.

I appreciate the information and would certainly talk to your guy in Fairbanks if you don't mind forwarding me his contact information.

Done. Good luck Zac.

Larry Bartlett at Pristine Ventures is a planner.

Deltana offers unguided caribou hunts.

Coyote Air does transporting too.

I'll recommend Brooks Range Aviation as well. Went went with them this year and had a good trip.

KEO,

A couple of my buddies and I are in the very early stages of planning the same hunt. We're probably 2-3 years out with our work schedules, but I'd appreciate you sending along any good contacts or info that you turn up.

I went on my first Alaska adventure in 1987 and have retuned every two three years since then. I certainly do not claim to be an expert on hunting in Alaska. However, over the years I have encountered problems and had questions. I wrote down the solutions and answers and I have updated the list after subsequent trips. Here is the latest version.

LOGISTICS FOR NONRESIDENT HUNTERS IN ALASKA

In Alaska nonresidents are required by law to hire a registered guide to hunt brown/grizzly bear, mountain goats, or Dall sheep. Someday I may want to hunt one of those species and then I may hire a guide. But until that day, I prefer to do everything myself and reap the greater personal satisfaction and lower cost that comes from doing it myself. A DIY hunt is also a lot cheaper than a guided/outfitted hunt and I couldn�t afford to go as often as I have unless I do it on the cheap. So all of my Alaska trips have been DIY mountaineering expeditions or DIY hunts where we did all the recon and planning (that�s half the fun) and provided all of our own camping gear and food. We contracted with Alaska companies only for watercraft rental and transportation.



A 120 quart Igloo or Coleman cooler is the largest that the US Postal Service will accept without charging extra for over-sized packages. Avoid wheels and small door in the top lid. The wheels make the cooler heavier and they take up room that could be filled with contents. The door makes the cooler leak in the rain. I mailed a 120-quart Igloo cooler via US Postal Service. I think it cost about $40. Had to mail four weeks early to ensure timely arrival or pay premium costs for faster service. It was mostly filled with freeze-dried and dehydrated food and other disposable/consumable stuff. Make sure you insure your mail and mark your name and address on the outside with magic marker, then seal it shut with strapping tape.

On the departing trip I checked only a rifle case and one large duffel bag filled with clothes, hunting items and camping gear. I also take a carry-on that holds travel items, a change of clothing and hunting boots. Make sure that there are no TSA prohibited items in your carry-ons.

Gun Case: needs to be very sturdy and have locks. I use a Cabelas two-gun "Bulletproof" gun case, which did the job fine. There are many that aren't as good and a few that are better. Pelican is supposed to offer some real good gun cases. You must declare your firearm at the ticket counter and have it inspected by TSA, then locked. Then you give it to the ticket agent at the counter. Your gun case gets special handling and it will be delivered at a location or window separate from regular baggage. That�s why I put all my fragile and expensive optics and electronics in the case along with my rifle. But also bring a soft case because the bush pilots want you to use a soft case in the airplane. The one I use floats and has hard rubber armor around the scope and receiver group. On mountaineering trips, instead of a gun case, I carried a ski bag.

There are some really good places to hunt that you can reach by driving from Anchorage but most of the best hunting will be accessed via a bush plane from a hub city. Alaska Airlines is the only major airlines that flies to the hub communities. I have and Alaska Airlines VISA credit card that accumulates air mile points. So I fly for free all the way to the hub community. If you want to hunt in Alaska, you should get one. The other major carriers do not fly to hub communities. I flown on Alaska Airlines to Anchorage, Juneau, Dillingham, Kotzebue and Kodiak. On one trip my buddy used Penn Air to fly to Dillingham and they left some people's baggage in Anchorage. He had to wait for two days for his gear to arrive. In the panhandle, you can get to some remote communities on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry system. You can also rent a boat in the panhandle and on Kodiak.

Airline flight schedules between the lower-forty-eight and Anchorage Airport can be awkward. It�s common to arrive after midnight in Anchorage and depart for a hub community at 06:00AM or 07:00AM the next morning. So it�s not really worth it to leave the airport and sleep in a motel. As a result it�s common to see people sleeping in the terminal on out-of-the-way benches with their gear beside them.

There are several regularly scheduled regional airlines including Peninsula Airlines (PennAir) that fly�s mostly around the Katmai Peninsula and Bristol Bay. Bering Air uses eight passenger �Caravan� turbo props and they have hubs in Kotzebue and Nome. They have their act together. I�ve also flown with a couple of services in the panhandle. Air Excursions uses little bush planes. Once they had to leave half of our baggage on the tarmac in Kake because the plane was too small to carry everything. I�ve also flown with Wings. They also use Caravans and IMO seem to have a more professional operation than Air Excursions. ERA-Hageland is another regional airlines and they claim to be as big as all of the other regional airlines combined. I suppose that there must be more, but these are the only ones that I'm familiar with. They are operated like municipal bus systems, expensive but a lot cheaper than using a bush plane to get to the smaller bush communities.

Talkeetna is a quaint little town that has an FAA airport and it is the main jumping-off point for flying climbers onto Mount McKinley. There are several skilled bush pilots that fly out of the FAA airport there. I don�t know for sure, but I wonder if you could get a good deal on flights during hunting season because the climbing season is over by then and maybe the pilots might welcome the business of flying hunters into the Talkeetna Mountains. I�ve flown with Hudson Aviation and K2, both were real good. If you do an Internet search for �Anchorage Talkeetna Shuttle� you will find several companies offering ground transportation from the Anchorage to Talkeetna.

If you need liquor, you have to plan ahead to make that happen. Beer is bulky and heavy and considering all the restrictions and costs associated with baggage on commercial airlines, beer is probably not your best bet. So if you need alcohol you probably want to buy it in Anchorage. Pack it in plastic bottles so that it won�t leak and put it in your checked baggage. You can buy liquor in Anchorage but that�s not necessarily true in the hub communities. Some hub communities have no restrictions on the sale of alcohol and some are damp, which means you can bring in your own liquor but there is none for sale in the community. Bush communities with a high percentage of Native American residents are generally dry.

Rent a satellite phone. They are the only way to communicate with your pilot. Look for Outfitter Satellite Phones on the Internet. http://www.outfittersatellite.com/ or http://www.satellitephonesolutions.com/

Prices in cities that are on the road system are only slightly higher than in the lower forty-eight. Kodiak and Juneau are large enough that the prices there are only about 10% higher than in the lower forty-eight. Plan on paying about double in the hub communities and expect prices to be higher than that in bush communities. You cannot carry fuel on an airliner so you have buy your fuel in the hub community. I�ve paid as much as $26/gallon for white gas. Bring everything else from home and avoid restaurants if you can.

Lodging was really expensive too. We paid $150/night for a sleazy hotel in Dillingham, in 2004. Nicer places were even more expensive. If I were to return to Dillingham, I would stay at the King Fisher Inn. They charge $75/person/night. But that includes free use of a car. It's a nice, new, clean B&B and they have two bungalows that can sleep four people each. I paid $100/night to stay at Bibbers B&B in Kotzebue in 2007. It was clean and respectable. In fact, the owner likes to interview hunters to make sure that they�re going to treat the place with respect. In 2009, we returned early to Kotzebue and had to get some lodging without reservations. The only place that had rooms was the Nulagvik Hotel which is about equal in quality to a Motel 6. It cost $245/night. In 2013, we stayed one night at the Best Western in Kodiak and it cost only $108/night. Best of all, try to avoid lodging all together and camp in the bush until the last day. You can reserve/rent remote US Forest Service cabins, in the Tongass National Forest at a very reasonable cost. http://www.fs.fed.us/r10/tongass/cabins/cabin_info.shtml Also in the Chugash NF. http://www.fs.fed.us/r10/chugach -> Recreation.

If you go to Kotzebue, you should rent something (anything) from Walt Maslen at Northwest Alaska Backcountry Rentals. http://www.northwestalaska.com/ . The rental gear comes with free advice and recon that�s priceless.

Also if you hunt out of Kotzebue, make sure that your pilot does not drop you on one of the rivers that are close to KOTZ. The pilots like to make short flights because they can make more of them but the best hunting in mid-September will be further away. If you can wait to hunt in early October, the �bou might be closer to KOTZ. Most bush pilots stop flying north of the Noatak River on September 30. We flew with Northern Air Trophy, in 2007 and we used Northwestern Aviation in 2009. Both are based in Kotzebue and I would fly with both pilots again. I flew with Tik-Chik Airventures, out of Dillingham, in 2004 and I would use them again also. In 2013, we flew with Andrew Airways in Kodiak. They did a good job while fighting miserable weather conditions.



If you are going to be anywhere near a river, then go prepared to fish. Arctic char, Dolly Varden, rainbows, graylings, and pike follow the salmon up the rivers. Cast anything orange into the river. We killed 'em using big orange spoons and orange plastic eggs. My buddy tied some orange parachute chord onto a hook so it looked like a salmon egg and caught several fish using that. I took 6 pound monofilament and the pike chewed it up. I switched to 15# Spiderwire. It's just as light and much stronger. Another guy did well using little red plastic eggs and dropped them into the water just behind a run of spawning salmon where two rivers met.



On each trip, we took a little extra food and each time we returned with some food left over because we were eating game meat and fish. Half of a freeze-dried entre' compliments fish nicely. However, I've heard many stories about bad weather preventing pilots from picking up hunters for several days. A buddy was hunting on the Alaska bush on 9/11/01 and all planes were grounded. He was in the bush for an extra week and had no clue why the pilot didn�t come to pick them up (no sat phone). They ate their extra rations and then they ate lots of game meat, fish, and wild berries while waiting for the plane.



If it's warm, you will have to be concerned with keeping your meat from spoiling while waiting to return to the bush community. We put our meat in game bags, kept it clean and hung it up every night covered by a tarp to keep it dry. We saw that some other hunters had placed their meat in a side braid of the river so that the cold water kept the meat cool. We also used Game Saver citric acid spray. You mix the powder with water in a spray bottle and it works great. I ordered it over the Internet from Indian Valley Meat Co., in Indian Valley, AK. http://www.indianvalleymeats.com/about.htm

BTW meat processing and storage was really expensive. Cut it into big chunks yourself, put it in clean game bags that you bring from home. In 2004, there was a guy operating a huge walk-in freezer in Dillingham and he had setup cutting tables outside that hunters could use to de-bone the meat. In some Alaska game management units, it�s illegal to debone the meat until you arrive at a city that has an airport. It was expensive to keep the meat in his freezer, but well worth it if you compare that to the fines imposed for wanton waste of game meat. There are no public freezer facilities in Kotzebue. Alaska Airlines has a freezer facility in Kotzebue for freezing and shipping frozen cargo, but they will not allow storage overnight. So you have to arrive at the terminal early in the morning and get the meat into the freezer for an afternoon flight. Also, you have to be a "Known Shipper" for the airlines to accept your meat as air cargo. It takes a month or so to get through the TSA red tape to become a "Known Shipper". In Kotzebue, there is a well established network for notifying locals of hunters wanting to donate game meat. All of the panhandle hub communities have freezer facilities for freezing fish and most can also handle meat from big game animals. I�ve read that Alaska Air Cargo is � the cost of Fed EX and UPS, but I haven�t used them myself.



It has rained or snowed every time that I have been to Alaska and you need to be prepared to hunt in the rain and bad weather. But there have also been some sunny days on each trip. Imagine how clear and clean the air is in a place where there are no cars and the air is washed clean by rain half the time. Setup a rain fly outside your tent so you are not confined to the tent in the rain. Limbs from willows and alders make for passable poles. We used several strategies for rain shelters; driftwood and the oars from the raft on one trip, just the rain fly and poles only on another trip, and on other trips we simply took a 6-man dome tent with a big vestibule. Each strategy has its� pros and cons.



I was expecting to encounter insects in Biblical swarms. But they weren't as bad as I had expected. We all had repellent but we didn't need it all the time. When we did need it, it worked. This was the situation in the spring and fall. I suppose that they may be worse in July and August.

If you are going to use a raft, then take some good hip waders. Make sure to assemble your raft and check everything out before your pilot leaves. When we floated out of Dillingham, we had two rafts for four people. One of the pumps didn't work. If they had been alone they literally would have been up a creek without a raft because the pilot left before they knew the pump was bad. Also one of the valves had a slow leak and we had to keep refilling that raft. In 2009 we had to cross a fast flowing river. Three of us had bib waders and we locked arms while crossing so we were OK. But the fourth guy had hip waders and he couldn�t cross because the water was too high/fast and his waders would have filled with water and pulled him under.

[img]http://i728.photobucket.com/albums/ww288/KCKeen/AKraft2007.jpg[/img]

I have used USGS maps and compass wandering and exploring over North America for more than 50 years and I am really confident with that system. But I got to use my GPS on one trip and learned what extra features it has to offer. It was worth the investment and I will carry it on future AK adventures. Mark the degrees (improve what's already there) on the margin of your map for pinpoint navigation, then have your map laminated at Kinkos.

We carried small Motorola two-way radios in case of emergency. We didn�t use them though, because radio recon for hunting is illegal. If you communicate via radio, your hunting is done for the day.

We used Leupold 10x42 binoculars in 2007. In 2009, my buddy showed up with a pair of Schwarovski 15x56 binos (@+$2,200) mounted on a tripod and used them to spot a black bear from five miles away. So I bought a pair of Nikon Action Extreme 16x50 binoculars ($220) and a tripod. They don�t perform anywhere near as good as those Swarovskis. I�m thinking of investing in a pair of Vortex 15x56 binoculars ($1,200). We both had chest harnesses attached to our binos.

I use to use a wood/blue rifle and my buddy used a Remington 7600, blue with synthetic stock and Leupold Scope. We didn�t have any corrosion problems until we got back into a warm building. Moisture condensed on the cold barrels and they rusted inside the gun cases and I had to re-blue mine when I got home. It�s probably not a good idea to open up a gun case and dry your rifle inside the airport terminal. TSA might frown on that. They have no sense of humor. I tried using a silicone impregnated gun sock on a subsequent trip but the barrel still rusted. I finally bought a T/C Icon Weathershield 30-06 rifle with a Leupold VX-3 scope. It�s heavy and ugly but extremely durable, weatherproof and MOA accurate. We met some native subsistence hunters who use small caliber rifles and shoot caribou from a boat, at close range while they are crossing a river. They said that it is part of their overall strategy to waste as little of the animal as possible.

We used MSR �Whisperlite� stove on one trip and an MSR �Dragonfly� on another trip and MSR �Alpine Guide� pots. Don't forget a frying pan. We fried the fish in 1/8" water. I didn�t see any butane for sale in hub community stores. So, if I had taken a butane canister stove, I would have been out of luck and would have to buy another stove before going into the field. I only saw white gas and propane for sale in the stores.

[img]http://i728.photobucket.com/albums/ww288/KCKeen/Camps/IM001198.jpg[/img]

We used a Cabelas XPG Expedition, 4-season, 4-person tent for two people, which weighs 13#. That tent has lots of room so you don�t get on each others nerves so much. On a float hunt the only weight you have to worry about is that which your bush pilot will impose so as not to overload the plane. We�ve used an REI Base Camp-6 tent for our rain shelter and I thought that the wind broke a tent pole. When I got home, I discovered that the problem was simply a loose ferrel that easily popped back into place.

The only thing that I regret about the caribou hunt in �07 is that we were not as selective as we could have been. We saw thousands of caribou and it reminded me of the Serengetti Plain on some National Geographic TV special. Both of us shot respectable bulls before noon on the first day that we could legally hunt. You cannot hunt on the same day that you fly. But we saw bigger bulls while carrying meat back to camp.

[img]http://i728.photobucket.com/albums/ww288/KCKeen/Critters/IM001212.jpg[/img]

On that trip, we rafted 80 miles back to an Eskimo bush community and flew back to Kotzebue on Bering Airlines. Meeting an Eskimo family and spending the night in their home, was one of the highlights of the trip.

[img]http://i728.photobucket.com/albums/ww288/KCKeen/P1010083.jpg[/img]

My buddy took some T.T.C. (Taxidermy Trophy Compound) https://www.bringmin.com/catalog/index.php and used it to treat the capes in the field. It�s lighter than salt. If you are not returning to the lower forty-eight immediately, put some �Stop Rot� on the cape. I left mine at the meat processor for two weeks and instructed them to keep it frozen. They put it in a cooler (not a freezer) and it was ruined.

There�s a meat processor at 7th and M streets in Anchorage.

US Postal Service: You don't want things to get lost so mark your name and address on the outside of all packages in such a way that it can't possibly get lost, torn off, etc. They will accept some really odd looking packages so long as they are within certain dimensional restrictions. I have mailed two sets of caribou antlers via US Postal Service and they arrived in perfect condition. Cut the skull plate in half and nest one antler inside the other, tape them together and cover all the points with cardboard and duct tape. It looks really awkward but works fine. I also mail back my large duffel bag full of clothes and camping gear. I used the same cooler to carry frozen meat, as my luggage on the plane and I mailed my gear home, again with USPS. I froze the meat, put it in the cooler and it was still frozen when I got home.

[img]http://i728.photobucket.com/albums/ww288/KCKeen/Critters/DSCN0940.jpg[/img]

OTHER THINGS I HAVE LEARNED

I hate marsh mounds.

Bush-wacking through second-growth rain forest is a PITA.

Whatever you do, do not setup your tent on muskeg marsh.

Good luck, have a great adventure and a safe hunt.

KC

KC

Thank you for that information and the extensive writeup. It is greatly appreciated.

You may find some of the better outfitters and flight services already booked!

Good point. When I hunted caribou, we tried to book the bush pilot before Christmas. If you want to hunt this year, you better get on it. It may already be too late.

Vern,
Do you have anybody you like flying out of Kotzebue? We know we need to get on it, just don't want to pick the wrong person simply because we didn't at least try to do our homework.
Thank you in advance for any help/insight you might have.

PMed ya!