Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game DIY Moose/caribou experiences. .please share

Outstanding info!

You could sell that article to a major hunting magazine...

Guy

3 of us did a drop-camp Caribou hunt on the N Slope in '11. It was a $3,500 drop camp that ended up being ~$7K door to door including airfare, return shipping of anters/hides, and a snafu that left all of our gear sitting on the tarmac in Deadhorse so that needed to be shipped home as well.

If doing the same 7 day hunt from the lower 48 again, I'd schedule 2 weeks off of work. We just barely made our flight out of Deadhorse on a Monday. Had we not made it, the next available open seat was Thursday.

If you have an Alaska Airlines VISA credit card (fly for free) AND IF everything goes right, you can do a DIY caribou hunt out of Kotzebue for half of that cost and you can do it in nine days.

KC

KC, great write-up.

KC, great article. I've done the Kotzebue hunt a couple of times and wish I had this info before my first one!

KC,

Great write up. More info there than a lot of residents may know. Rick should make that a sticky!

Hats off to KC for a very thorough and informative write up.

I hunt moose, elk, bear, and caribou pretty much every year in northern BC. We always just go and do it, done about 1/2 dozen fly ins and the rest is just remote access.

If its fly in, make sure you have a very good pack frame as you and that frame are going to be very well acquainted by the trips end for better or for worse. I would pass on alcohol on a fly in, weight is at a premium as is your ability to work like a dog - booze interferes with both.

Think about being in a valley bottom, spotting game above the tree line in the evening. Get up before dawn, hike up and be on that game as dawn breaks and then make 2 to 4 trips up and down packing the quarters out. In all honesty by the time we get back to camp with the last quarter from the morning we are done for the day.

Moose are big heavy animals, as others have mentioned, think about getting it out before you shoot. Think about a quarter that weighs more than a deer... And hours and hours of brutal labor. Not trying to discourage you it just that it is what it is.

Good tent, a good synthetic bag for southern Alaska. I have had good results with the MSR Dragonfly for many, many years.

Caribou are like a big deer - no big deal. It would pay to study the migration patterns of the caribou in the area you are going to hunt. FME they never stop moving. I like to set up in a choke area that I know they will be passing through.

Bears are like rats in BC. I've never given much thought to hunting them as they are all over and in the way often as not.

If you are river hunting one can be more generous with the creature comforts.