These six adventuress will test your body, spirit, nerves and hunting skills like no others. Are you game?
Jul 14, 2005
EAST RUSSIA BROWN BEARS // Russian Far East
The Magadan region of the Russian Far East is home to one of the largest concentrations of big Eurasian brown bears in the world. Though slightly smaller than its cousin, the Alaskan coastal brown bear, the Eurasian variety of Ursus arctos native to far eastern Siberia has a reputation for being highly aggressive.
"A huge bear in the Russian Maritimes is a nine-footer, but they're definitely a meaner variety than what we see on this side of the Bering Sea," says Larry Rivers, an Alaskan outfitter who books Magadan bear hunts for Kulu Safaris. "The Russians are absolutely terrified of them. We tell clients that when the bear charges you, don't try to kill it standing up, because if you try to shoot down on him he'll almost always run under the bullet. You want to drop on one knee and aim at his nose. That way, even when your heart's pounding, you'll hit him somewhere and take him the length of his body."
The best time to hunt Russian brown bears is when they leave their dens in early to mid-May and begin their migration toward the Sea of Okhotsk. To get to the hunting grounds, you'll helicopter into a remote base camp 200 miles north of Magadan. Though the days are long in May, the weather is still highly unpredictable and the snowpack is 6 to 8 feet deep. You'll travel by snowmobile and trudge on snowshoes from camp through vast elfin cedar forests crawling with brown bears.
"In thirteen days we covered more than eighteen hundred miles-almost never on a trail-wrestling snowmobiles through deep snow, crossing creeks and fighting our way through trees and brush," says Brian Cox, who hunted Magadan in 2003 and shot a 9-footer. "It was an exhausting but exhilarating experience. My guide and I were out seventeen to eighteen hours a day. The weather was all over the place and the bears were everywhere. It's just an amazing hunt. Incredibly tough, but amazing."
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