Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Spring bear hunt -- 2021!

Sorry for all the installments here. I've been at work and I've been butchering.

So 2.5 hours after stepping onto the beach we had my dad's bear in the inflatable canoe and we paddled down the river towards our skiff anchored in the salt water. I absolutely love canoeing on rivers but I don't get much of a chance to do that in this part of the state. After the tension of the stalk, the shooting and tracking of the bear, dragging, gutting, etc. the raft riding silently down a calm river is the perfect experience. The brown bear sow and cub had come back out onto the grass -- they didn't mind at all when we floated by.

We were almost back to the boat when I noticed, in the opposite corner of the inlet from my dad's bear, there was a barrel shaped tree stump moving around the tree-line. As tired as I was I couldn't help but get a closer look. We turned the canoe around and paddled back into the inlet. We glided as close as we could get while still being hidden to the bear, and I stepped out of the canoe into the marshy bed of seaweed. Sneaking up the beach as quietly as I could, I turned the corner that would let me get a good look at this new bear. A nice boar, and a cinnamon color phase to boot. Okay -- time for this guy to come to dinner:



The nice thing is that at this point we had the canoe really close, so while I gutted the cinnamon boar my dad paddled the canoe to essentially right up to me. I couldn't help but notice, 700 yards farther away, a third black bear had just emerged...lucky for them we were all pretty spent at that point. We rolled it into the boat on top of the other bear and finished paddling back to our boat. Really impressed with the SOAR inflatable canyon canoe by the way, it had close to 800 pounds on board with us and the bears, and it still had good floatation and handled well. Rated to 875lbs I believe.

A fast skiff ride home on an abnormally calm night, and a couple hours of skinning and quartering!