Originally Posted by ironbender
Originally Posted by cwh2
Originally Posted by 79S
At one point flying in was pretty damn reasonable. Not anymore they charging 2 grand a head now days.. doing the 5 mile walk is not a walk in the park, it sucks a$$. Stop in Tok get two 40 mile fall permits and head up the Taylor hwy around mile post 90 start looking..

This.

40 mile available in Aug?


Looks like on or around the 10th for opener, Mike.. And what do you care, you rat? You have a permit here on the Kenai. (That one was mine, you know!)

Hard to tell when the caribou will be accessible off the Taylor, or how long season will last (closure by EO, when they estimate 1,000 caribou have been taken). Last time I was up there was about 10 years ago. Caribou everywhere as we walked in Aug 9 and 10 on an attempted sheep hunt . Got stormed/short-timed out on that, and killed one (almost two) on the way back out to the truck where we learned season was closing at midnight, Aug 13.. Had we known that, we would have dropped 2 more with the first- we all had permits. Season lasted 3 days, with an over-quota harvest, so the next year they moved opener to Sept 1, but it looks like it is back to August 10 or thereabouts . Probably meaning few caribou around early on, unlike our last trip up. Stupid animals! smile

My yarn on that should be in the archives. All my pics from that are in my locked Photobucket account. (too many pics- the bastids)

On 3 successive hunts in mid 70's off the Taylor (18 mile backpack in), I never saw a caribou during our August sheep hunts.

Rereading my previous post I used bad wording- indicating I be staying away from the Taylor.. Nope - that is where I'm headed most likely. Gotta talk to Tok biologist some then make a SWAG guess as to when caribou might be there. Unlike all my previous trips up the Taylor, time is not much of a factor. I am retired now, by damn!

Still, the Taylor is a helluva nice area for a camping trip. Good news is my prelim research earlier today indicates something in excess of 70K animals. And still growing. It ain't Western Arctic's 215K, but it will have to do. I'm gonna miss shooting them from the snow machine up there - I killed 4 winter 2017/18 - stocking my freezer down here, and only one was more than 4 miles from the Kotzebue apartment. That last sausage bull Feb 2, 2018 was about 9 miles out. Easy meat.

From last Taylor hunt:

[Linked Image]

Last edited by las; 04/12/19.
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