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In early 2016, before knowing I would draw a sheep bow-hunt in the Chugach range, I had booked an unguided caribou hunt in northern Alaska for 3 of us (me-60, brother Walter-65, and his son Matt-late 30-something). Inspired by HUNT MAN’s epic “Living on Tundra Time” post, I decided to post my story here also. This caribou hunt was in mid-August, before my October sheep bowhunt.

It’s a boring time of the year for me so I will give a lot of details. I will cover some of our experience with footwear, meat care, meat weight, transport issues, bugs, fishing, ptarmigan (lack of), walking on tundra, etc. I will say if you go it would be great if you can bring some younger guys along for help. The tundra is mean! Finding a transporter or drop-camp outfit was somewhat of a pain in the ass. It seems like every outfit, no matter how good, will have at least one bad review. After the dust settled I ended up booking with Arrowhead Outfitters, which was also the same outfit HUNT MAN used, and they do have a mixed reputation. We booked through Cabela’s, thinking that might give us some leverage, but who knows. Outside of a few minor glitches Arrowhead did what they said they were going to do, in our case. We did not see a huge number of animals, but we filled 4 of 6 tags in less than 4 days of hunting. Then we decided to come home a few days early, and they picked us up the day after we called them. So we have no major complaints.

The logistics for this hunt, coming entirely from out of state are a pain, but I guess that’s true for most AK hunt. One reason for writing this story is I hope some of our experiences will be helpful for anyone trying to do this type of hunt, I know I learned a lot from HUNTs post and other contacts.

The quick overview; we flew into Fairbanks, rented a truck, drove ~400 miles up the haul road to Prudhoe Bay, back 40 miles to outfitter base, then take floatplanes ~50 miles out on tundra. Then reverse route including meat and antlers from 4 caribou. We brought all meat and antlers back as checked baggage. For more details keep reading. Our booked hunt dates were Aug. 11-18, I’ve gotten the impression later dates would probably be better in terms of migration and animal densities, but we had some calendar issues to work around. Some of the later dates with Arrowhead were also booked up.

I was a walking Zombie at that point but still only got 3 or 4 hours of sleep, which made matters worse. Next day we drove back to base camp and waited to be flown out. The weather was a bit dicey all day (low ceiling) so it was not looking likely. We were supposed to take 2 planes in and swap places with 3 guys from TX. They had only 3 tags to fill, and had done so a couple of days earlier and were ready to go home. This does bring up one favorable thing about the Arrowhead price structure; if you have an odd number of people it is much easier to make the weight limits. We were definitely over their 70 lb/person weight limit, but since we had 2 planes it didn’t really matter. Of course in hindsight we had some stuff we could have, and perhaps should have left behind, more on that later.

So my party got split up. I had most of my hunting gear, my sleeping bag, and some food. Tex had a jetboil so we had mountain house for supper. But neither one of us had a purifier so we were a bit short on drinking water, I guess we could have boiled some if it was an emergency. The lake water was probably safe but it was very stained. Tex gives me the recap of their hunt and an overview of the area, which was extremely helpful. They shot 3 bulls; one very nice, another good one, and a young one, in I believe 4 or 5 days. Some caribou around but overall sparse population of bulls, they were disappointed in the amount of game they saw. They had decided to just buy one tag per person, our party bought 2 tags each (any caribou sex in this area). Tex was very worried about the condition of the first caribou they shot (I will talk about our experience later). No bears in or near camp (good), only one ptarmigan seen (bad). [In fact we never saw a ptarmigan, which was disappointing. I brought a small single shot 20 g and a box of shells just for that purpose. We also brought a small grill and some charcoal thinking we would have ptarmigan and/or fish to supplement mountain house, neither happened]

He also mentions a caribou trail leading to the main area they were hunting, which was a river valley about a mile west. Unfortunately I didn’t get the exact location of this trail (it is hard to see unless you are almost standing on it), nor did I realize how significant it was, until later.

So I finally get some sleep (even though it never really gets dark this time of year), and the next morning (Hunt Day 1-Thursday) I head off to the river valley. It was my first experience walking on the tundra, and it sucks as bad as advertised. I think HUNT MAN described it as “floating basketballs”, my variation of the description would be a water bed filled with bowling balls. The fact the ground moves when you step on it is bad enough, but what makes it worse is it moves in unpredictable ways. And every now and then you just step in a hole up to your knee.

Just to repeat the recommendation; good walking sticks are a lifesaver! I brought both breathable waders and hunting boots; I mostly wore Kenetreks with gaitors, and breathable rainpants for hunting. I did get some water in my boots a couple of times. There were some real wet spots where waders would be helpful; I managed to avoid those areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gJ3mZfGuD4

I do remember after my first or second shot the trailing caribou stopped. It was still standing but straight away so I was not sure I had hit it (I did). The lead caribou then started quartering away giving me an angle on him, so I shot at him.

When the smoke cleared there were two bull caribou dead on the tundra at 200-250 yards away. It turns out the trailing caribou was much bigger than the lead caribou; in hindsight if I had more time to judge them perhaps I just would have just shot the bigger one. Oh well. Here are some pics.

I need to make a trip to Alaska again, soon...

While I’m still absorbing the situation I hear the buzz of a plane, look up and see them fly over, Walter and Matt finally showed up. So I get to work on the caribou, which takes me about 3 hours by myself. I had thought I might do a euro mount with the larger caribou skull, but the coup de grace shot was a bit off and messed up that idea. I would end up just cutting skull plates off.

I was a bit short of game bags, but got almost everything bagged up and moved 50 yards from first carcass. One hindquarter of the trailing caribou was shot up pretty badly, I dismembered it a bit and laid the meat on some small bushes to drain and hopefully dry off. Due to shortage of bags I also laid one shoulder on a bush. I cut one side of ribs off of the larger caribou, but stripped the rest of the rib meat off. We ended up cooking the ribs on the small grill, it was a pain but they were great! Fat off some wild game is not very tasty, but the charred caribou fat was the best part. So I load up all of the backstraps and tenderloins, along with the one rack of ribs and start heading back. After going a few hundred yards I see Walter and Matt walking towards me more or less on the same path I took, we meet up about 600 yards from the kill site by a patch of alders. Luckily they had plenty of water. I rested a bit and then took my load back to camp taking the way I came in on. I don’t think my pack weighed over 40 lbs but it was very tough walking. I think back about HUNT MANs story where he and Nick each carried an entire caribou over 2 miles back to camp, in one trip! I guess for younger and stronger guys it’s feasible, to me it seems impossible!

Day 2-Friday; Walter and Matt go sit at the glassing spot and stay there all day. I walk to the kill sight, saw off the skull plates, clean up and bag the remaining meat, and haul everything to the alders. In hindsight I should have stripped the velvet off, but thought there might be a chance of saving it and was trying to keep my options open. From there I made 2 trips back to camp, man it was tough for an old guy, and I was not carrying very heavy loads. At this point I/we had still not figured out the caribou trails, except for a short segment near camp. I was growing to hate the tundra. I would rather carry a 50-60 lb pack in the mountains of Colorado than a 30-40 lb pack on the tundra. I know I drank more than a gallon of water/Gatorade during the day. It did warm up considerably this day, probably hit 60+ degrees. At the end of day 2 I had everything back at camp except one shoulder and the antlers, I was beat. During Day-2 Walter and Matt (actually this was their first hunt day) saw a decent number of caribou, and had some walk within 100 yards of them, but they were all cows and a few small bulls. There was a herd of 20-30 caribou a long ways off (~2 miles+) to the SW, but it was across a river that I was not sure we could ford. If necessary I guess we would have tried it at some point, but the short term plan was just to wait and see if some other caribou would eventually filter by. During the next few days we also had a few cows walk within rifle range of camp.

It got cloudy and cool again for the next couple of days, but the dampness started to be an issue for the meat. I have kept elk and other game for many days in camp at similar temperatures without spoiling, but I’ve usually been in drier environments. My guess is the blood on the wet game bags eventually started to go rancid, which is not a good smell. I’ll just fast-forward on this issue; it became a big worry for me. On the drive back we stopped at the first clear stream and washed all of the meat from my caribou off, and put everything in a new set of bags. The meat looked fine (and is fine now), but the bags stunk pretty bad. If I had to do it again I would be more vigilant about trying to get things dried out, but I’m not sure it would have been possible. I would also consider trying the citric acid approach, but this is something I’ve never done (or needed) before. The other 2 caribou were killed later in the trip and this was not an issue.

Matt and Walter decided they had enough fun, so we called outfitter and asked to be picked up as soon as possible. The weather forecast on my inReach (which was reasonably accurate by the way) was also looking worse for our scheduled pickup day (Thursday), so we decided to get out when we could.

Bought some more ice for the meat boxes, got room at motel, and rearranged airline tickets to go home next day. Matt & Walter got hit with a pretty big fare increase (to east coast), I bought my ticket with points and this time there was no extra charge for the change (in October there was).

Not sure what the final outcome will be for any of the antlers.

I bought a fake caribou skull with the intention of staining the antlers and mounting them on it, but it is way down the list of "fun" things to do. I guess I haven't ruled out getting fake velvet put back on the antlers, but the stuff I've seen didn't look all that great.

By the way you would not have needed to split and box the antlers. You can tape cut up cardboard and foam on the antlers and use heavy duty shrink wrap on the antlers and put them on as checked baggage. We did it on a 64" wide moose with no problems.