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February 11, 2013
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With new opportunities for wolf trapping and hunting opening up, more people are keeping an eye out for them. Here are a couple of tips for finding them and determining if wolves are calling your hunting grounds home.
There are three basic ways you can tell if wolves are near. The first way, of course, is seeing and hearing them on a regular basis. This sounds straight forward, but keep in mind that often wolves can be in an area without being seen.
[ Read Full Post ]January 23, 2013
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If there is an epitome of trapping, it is the pursuit of the wolf. There are few creatures as intelligent, wily, and powerful as the wolf, and here in Alaska I have the unique opportunity to play my cards with them every winter. Last season I only managed to catch one, but this year is off to a good start.
A pack of wolves—the same pack from which I caught the black one last year—returned to my marten trap line a few weeks ago. I saw their tracks at the beginning of the season, but I wanted to pattern them, and nearly eight weeks passed before they were back. One of the challenging things about trapping wolves is the mental side of it. I knew that these wolves would probably come back, and had a good idea of where they should return, but I had my doubts. I waited to see what would happen, and when they did come back, it was in the exact spot where they jumped on my trail last year. The next weekend I set out about 18 snares and a handful of Alaskan #9 legholds, and spent a lot of time at work daydreaming about how things would go down.
[ Read Full Post ]January 7, 2013
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A couple days after Thanksgiving, my belly still full of turkey, we were out after more deer with two new guests at the lodge, Zeev and Wayne. As if the hunting hadn’t been good before, Luke assured me that I was about to have my mind blown. The snowstorm had just blown out, and the winds were calm enough that we could make it into some bays that are usually very productive. They are surrounded by steep mountains, so as soon as there’s much snow, all of the deer are pushed down to within a hundred yards or so of the beach.
[ Read Full Post ] January 4, 2013
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Thanksgiving Day on Afognak Island brought a nasty windstorm. This made a lot of areas inaccessible by boat due to a large swell, so we hunted the woods around Seal Bay. Another of Luke’s buddies, Josh Tobey, and I were dropped off on one side of the bay, and Luke, Adam, and Kevin hopped off on the other.
[ Read Full Post ] January 2, 2013
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My usual greeting when arriving at Afognak Wilderness Lodge for a blacktail deer hunt goes something like, “You should have been here last week! We had a ton of snow and the hunting was phenomenal!” Well this year I finally hit it perfect. I arrived two days before Thanksgiving and right after a big dump of snow to spend the holiday hunting with my buddies Josh and Luke Randall.
[ Read Full Post ] December 21, 2012
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Most of us know the overwhelming sense of accomplishment when we work our rear end off to harvest an animal, then work it off even harder to get it out of the woods. Although this is often the case, sometimes things just fall into place—almost too easily. I’m not one to pass up a freebie, and that’s pretty much how my moose hunt went this year.
[ Read Full Post ] November 13, 2012
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If you’ve spent much time in interior Alaska, you’re aware that the seasons go from full on summer to full on winter in a matter of only a few weeks. On one of the last weekends before the snow hit, my buddy JR and I took my boat out on the river for one last hurrah.
I had just fixed my jet unit after battering it while I was hauling my moose out of the bush, so I just couldn’t stand putting it away without one last good trip. This time we were in pursuit of the late-running coho salmon, or silvers as we call them.
[ Read Full Post ]November 9, 2012
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Over the years I’ve gone through enough knives to outfit a steakhouse, but most of them have been just another knife. That all changed the first time I used a Havalon. My buddy Steve let me use his to cape my Dall sheep, and I couldn’t believe how fast I was able to get it done. I was sold on it right then and there as a caping knife, but Havalon knives are much more than that.
[ Read Full Post ]November 8, 2012
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After having a compound bow that did little more than take up closet space for several years, I got back into shooting traditional bows last year. I don’t have anything against compounds, but they aren’t for me. Traditional bows have a certain nostalgic appeal, and with all of the practice it took to improve my shooting with them, I’ve developed a certain attachment.
[ Read Full Post ]November 5, 2012
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As most of you can probably relate, work too often gets in the way of the hunting I would much rather be doing, and from the day I got back from my Chugach goat hunt, it was 60- to 70-hour work weeks with little hope of escape. All summer I had been looking forward to hunting the late bow season for moose, during which my dad and I took a nice meat bull last year. It wasn’t looking like I would get much time to hunt it this year, but I was finally able to sneak away the last three days of September. After throwing some gear together, I headed up to dump my boat in the river.
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