One of the other interesting parts of the trip involved another hike in the bushes. My friends had hiked up an open hillside and shot a buck and a doe in a hidden draw that was not visible from the water. I'd stayed on the boat that day and had gone sightseeing with the skipper and his buddy. We were hunting but hadn't seen anything, hence the sightseeing, so a plan was made that night to hike up the hill the next day.
We started off in the morning up a steep grassy hill that went up to the snowline. We climbed to about 2000' above sealevel and decided to sidehill around the point we were on. My friends had gone up the hill a little further than I just to get spread out a little bit as we hunted and sidehilled the steep "grassy open hillside".
The open grassy part ended at the first alder choked drainage.
Normally while hunting in Alaska my buddies and I all agreed to carry cold. Usually we hunted the tundra, muskeg areas on the mainland for caribou and moose and it was always safer and prudent to carry cold in the open country. Walking in tudra/muskeg ALWAYS leads to stumbling, bumbling, hopping from one tuft to another and inevitably falling on your face or azz.
As I got into the first alder choked drainage I realized this wasn't going to be easy. It's like a friggin' jungle jim. Up, over, under, through, crawl, swing from branch to branch, rifle over the shoulder with the sling - nope carry it - nope set it down so you can past the next tangle and so on. Of course I'm carrying cold, my buddies are way the he!! up the hill and I'm alone. When I reached the bottom of the draw there was a very, very well worn game trail. That's when it hit me that this wasn't just a deer trail but a Kodiak brown bear trail also. That's when I had to rethink the whole carrying cold thing. Do I risk shooting myself in the jungle jim thicket or risk a close encounter with Mr. Teeth and Claws with an unloaded rifle. It truly put a new spin on things. Muzzle control - yeah right. I thought, well if I carry hot it'd be a lot easier to shoot myself in case of an attack cause I'm sure not going to have time to kill a freakin' Kodiak brown bear with my 06 in the alder thicket from he!!.
Each of the next four or five drainages on the "open grassy hillside" posed the same delima.
I got to as far as we had planned to go and found a nice spot overlooking a open bowl to sit until evening. Only saw one deer that day that my buddies had spooked fom up above me. I caught a fleeting glimpse of the forky as he was running above me 175 yards away. I enjoyed the scenery and also watched whales feeding in the straights below me. That was cool. It started to get late and I decided to go to the pick up point to meet the skiff. Remember I'm 2000' above sealevel on a rather steep slope. It turned out to be a lot steeper than the one we climbed up.
The ankles were a little sore from the sidehilling that day and now I faced going 1/2 mile straight down the "open grassy hillside". It was steep enough that with every step I would look for the next tuft of any kind vegetation I could grab onto in case I slipped. I didn't want my next step, with my sore ankles, to start a human toboggan run, "with jumps" on the way down the "open grassy hillside".
I made back OK, no deer, no bear just sore ankles.
