That AO is some tough sledding. I might know something about a 3.5 day dall packout around there...MRI indicates some rough cartilage on the head of my right femur on account of that one. First two days were half loads, last 1.5 were one-trip.
Three trips for a mature bull elk, boned, including camp. Don't know what they weighed...heavy, for sure, but nothing like that dall pack, and nothing remotely close to a moose pack. And my dall pack was nothing like Thomas' goat pack.
Six trips for a bone-in moose: hinds, sandwich of front quarter and rib cage, then two more for neck/straps/horns/liver. The loose meat packs can get really heavy >150#. Bone-in hind on a halibut scale goes over 115#.
I almost drowned when I was 16 and was packing about 120 lb moose quarter on a frame in the dark and fell off of a beaver dam into water that was about 8 ft deep and muddy. I didn't want to lose the meat so I made it but it was a cool S O B evening and I had to strip and build a bonfire in order not to go into shock.
I have done some short heavy packs with moose( big ones) where packs were more than 300lbs but my last goat hunt was tough(three years ago). I packed the whole boned goat and gear from 1 mile above the upper Barnard Airstrip to the Chitina River Strip. This might not seem that rugged to you elk hunters but Gary the pilot weighed the pack at 204lbs when we got to McCarthy. That was 24 miles of pure glacial warzone(crevasses, morraine and mud-hell). It took me two twenty hour days to get to the bottom. I ate that goat all the way down the mountain. The experience was tough enough that I was hallucinating at the end of the pack.
Good God man.
