A U.S. Marine Captain matches wits with Canada moose in the wilds of northern British Columbia.
Jan 18, 2008
It's not easy to get to Grizzly Lake camp. Captain Brian Donlon (USMC) can attest to that. But he'll also tell you that it's well worth the trouble. One day late last August, he left his home in Washington, D.C., where he is currently stationed and where he trains Marines for combat, and flew to Vancouver, British Columbia.
There he hooked up with Outdoor Life's assistant photo editor, Michael Mohr, and me, and we boarded a prop plane to the small northern town of Fort St. John. The next morning Kevin Olmstead, owner of Prophet-Muskwa Outfitters, picked us up and we drove three hours north on the Alaska Highway to a grass landing strip that runs alongside the highway like a frontage road. Kevin's son, Sean, picked us up in his Cessna 206 and flew us for 25 minutes over rivers and streams and miles of muskeg before we finally reached Prophet-Muskwa's well-appointed lodge, nestled among the towering peaks at the very northern end of the Rocky Mountains. The next day it was a six-hour horseback ride to Grizzly Lake camp, one of Prophet-Muskwa's many outposts in its vast territory. And that's where the real adventure began.
PROMISING START Mohr and I were unpacking our things from the panniers that had ridden to camp on one of the 15 horses we trailed in. "You guys want to see a moose?" I could practically see the grin on Donlon's face before I even turned around. "Here, use this," he said, extending the binocular that had hung around his neck. "It's right over there." I stepped from the cabin we'd be calling home for the week, lifted the bino to my eyes and gazed where he was pointing, about halfway up one of the mountains that towered over the camp's namesake lake.
Sure enough, there it was. A nice bull. Not as mature as they can get in this part of the world, but certainly a shooter. We had been at camp all of 30 minutes and the guy had already spotted his first moose. Within minutes of glassing the bull, we spotted two elk and two grizzlies cruising along the mountainsides, and quickly realized why this region is referred to as the "Serengeti of North America."
"I can't believe this place," said Donlon, expressing the excitement we were all sharing at the time. "I had no idea it was going to be this easy."
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