Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Tent/Gear rentals Fairbanks?

Partner and I are flying in end of Aug. to hunt out of Bettles with Brooks Air. We're working out logistics for transporting gear. Coming from PA. Wondered if there was any rental options in Fairbanks that might save some shipping or baggage fees.

ckr:

You might want to consider using all your gear. You can mail a 120 quart Igloo cooler to your bush pilot via U.S. Postal Service for about $50. Fill it with freeze-dried and dehydrated food and other disposable/consumable stuff.

You can carry all your camping gear, including your share of the group gear, in a large duffel bag and put your fragile/expensive electronic stuff in your rifle case. So your checked baggage consists of a duffel bag and a rifle case. Your carry-on should contain travel items, a change of clothes and hiking boots.

Then use that cooler as checked baggage to transport meat on your way home. Mail your duffel bag full of gear again with USPS.

You can also mail your antlers. Cover all the points with cardboard and duct tape, cut the skull plate in half and nest one inside the other then tie them together with strapping tape. It looks really awkward but it works fine.

I've used this system many times without any problems.

KC

Might check w/ 2legit or vern.

We're planning for all our own gear and packing as KC suggests but just trying to check all options. Logistics from NW PA are both challenging and expensive.

ckr:

If I can do it from Colorado, you can do it from PA. You just need to be organized.

KC

I know some parties have palletized their gear and shipped it well in advance of travel.

KC - we can and hope to shoot 2 caribou each. Everyone says to go with waxed boxes but we've thought about cooler shipped up with gear & home with meat just worried about weight.

I don't know of any gear rental outfits in FBX.

I usually make one or two fly-outs a year and a couple Baja fishing trips and I've found the polarbearcooler.com size 48 to work best. Very durable.....fish arrive home to AK after two days of travel from Mexico.....They will meet the 50 pound luggage limit and pack nicely into bush planes. We take our camp foods into the bush in the cooler bag and bring out meat in same bag.

Much handier to use than hard coolers!

Baggage fees are nothing but a pebble in the path….don't bring the kitchen sink and you won't have to figure out where to store it once you arrive. Just bring what you need as baggage; allow time for it to follow you in case it gets lost along the way. (Don't arrive here on the 10 PM flight and charter out at 6 AM next day.) Book flights up which have minimal legs, and make sure there is plenty of time - a couple hours is reasonable- between flights to minimize potential for baggage loss. Fairbanks has Sportmans Warehouse and other places in case there are snafus.

ckr:

The problem with waxed boxes is that they are not insulated and I've worried that the meat might get too warm and spoil so I haven't shipped red meat in wax boxes. Each time I have deboned a caribou the ambient air temperature was near freezing, so the cooler was near freezing and the meat was cold when I put it in the cooler. It was still fine when I got home about 12 hours later.

I've shipped frozen fish overnight in wax boxes and that worked OK but there are no public freezer facilities in Kotzebue. You might want to check if there are public freezer facilities in Fairbanks or Bettles. Maybe your pilot has a freezer. If you can freeze the meat then it might be OK to use wax boxes.

A 48 quart cooler might work better for one caribou. I used a 120 quart cooler for one caribou and it was only about half full. Might be a way to skip overweight charges by using two smaller coolers instead of one big cooler.

KC

This is all good advice however, one thing that a resident might not think about is that many nonresidents can take only a week of vacation so they can't manage the kind of extra time that Klik suggests. Nice, but for some it may not be doable.

I've flown to Alaska from Colorado many times and no matter if I start from home at 06:00 AM or noon, I always seem to arrive in Anchorage around midnight. The flight the next day always seems to leave very early too, no matter where I'm going from Anchorage.... I just checked Alaska Airlines flight schedules and routes seem to be better timed from Baltimore to Fairbanks than they are from Denver to Anchorage.

In addition to free flights, there's another advantage of getting an Alaska Airlines credit card. That's the fact that your gear is taken care of by just one airlines all the way from home to the hub community without any changing hands and you don't have to mess with it at layovers. BTW I don't own any Alaska Airlines stock. It just makes sense to me to fly for free.

You know you can drive to Bettles/Evansville from Fairbanks, but it's a long drive. Is Brooks Air picking you up in Fairbanks?


Right on. Good to keep in mind.

KC

of course most of us are like you and not much spare time. BUT if you book flights so close, and your gear/gun etc.. doesn't go with you, what good are you doing sitting out there looking at bou instead of harvesting?

I try to make sure all my layovers are minimum of 2-3 hours. Just works better. Plus I can make a short layover by running and or catchign a golf cart at the airport. You can bet my luggage may not.

Rather have a day less in teh field but have what I need, than be in teh field with stuff missing.

RE freezers, as many times as I've flown into Fairbanks, they always had a walk in freezer in the airport you could pay a bit to put your coolers in, overnight or such, lid open of course. I have not flown there lately though so it may no longer be there, or broke or whatever... but they used to have that in previous years.

Hmm... now you have me thinking again... old age crap... maybe it was the other way around it was ANC with freezer and not FBK? CRS ain't worth a flip.

ANC still has storage and freezer space.

ANC: http://dot.alaska.gov/anc/index.shtml

FAI: http://www.dot.state.ak.us/faiiap/index.shtml

where they got u going /floating ..hungry country in them parts..

what are you interested in renting?

might be able to hook you up depending on what type of equipment you need.

Thanks all for the helpful thoughts and responses. 2legit - sent you a PM. As some have suggested, time (or lack of) is an issue. I'd love to drive from FB to Bettles but we need to have some leeway in time/travel for delays, snafus and potential weather issues. We've made reservations to be in FB in evening (theoretically) and get Wright Air from FB to Bettles the next afternoon. Should allow time to make sure luggage is all there and opportunity to acquire anything missing. Hangar at Betttles has freezer space we can utilize to cool meat. In a perfect world we'll end up back there with a day to reorganize and hopefully process and pack meat for travel. atvalaska - plan is for them to put us where the critters are. Not a float trip but likely along a lake N of Bettles.