General moose hunting season comes to a close

Today marks the end of the 2016 general moose season in this area. I’ve been out a few times, locally, and saw cows with calves but nothing I could legally shoot. Since I didn’t draw an antlerless moose permit, as usual, I couldn’t do anything but watch the cows. That’s still fun!

A good friend and off-and-on hunting partner was hunting in the Knik Public Use Area this past week. Since I’m writing this a few days ahead of publication to meet deadlines, I don’t know if he harvested a moose or not. I hope he did! We’ve been on several hunts together over the years, including a couple out in the KPUA. On one of those hunts, a mutual friend took a small bull. Generally, though, that area receives so much moose hunting pressure that the odds of taking a moose are relatively low.

As I mentioned previously, the local area I’m hunting is also inundated with hunters. I’ve gotten in the habit over the last few years of wearing at least a hunter orange hat during the moose season. Sometimes I’ll augment the hat with an orange vest and, if the weather is chilly enough, I’ll wear a pair of orange gloves as well. Even though there’s no legal requirement to wear the orange, I’d rather be safe than mistaken for a moose!

If I could afford to, I’d charter out into a more remote, wilderness area, preferably with few or no other hunters. Sure, I’d like to harvest a nice bull, who wouldn’t, but not having to worry about unethical and unsafe hunters wandering around taking random shots is more important to me. I just wish everybody would take a hunter education course and behave in a legal, safe and ethical manner while hunting.

Before somebody misconstrues what I’ve just said, the overwhelming majority of hunters are safe, legal and ethical. There’s a small percentage of slobs who thing the law doesn’t apply to them and who feel, since they were born males, that they inherently know how to safely handle a firearm. Those are the ones I worry about.

My brother lives in Missouri and gave up turkey hunting several years ago after some idiot put a load of birdshot into the tree truck immediately above his head while he was calling. Luckily for him, he was sitting on the ground and not on a stool, which would have elevated him directly into the line of fire. My brother is a big guy who looks nothing like a turkey, but some moron decided to take a “sound shot” rather than identify the target. To make things worse, my brother was hunting on his own private property where no one else had permission to hunt. He was not a happy camper after that incident!

Let’s switch to another topic: blackpowder shooting! This past week, because of the calendar structure for the month, both the blackpowder pistol and blackpowder rifle shoots occurred in the same week at the shooting range in Palmer. The Mt. McKinley Mountainman club sponsors a monthly blackpowder pistol shoot the second Tuesday of every month, year around. The same applies to the rifle shoot, which occurs on the third Saturday of each month. The pistol shoot starts at 6 pm and the rifle shoot begins at 9 am.

I was able to attend both matches. At the pistol shoot, I was firing a “new to me” revolver I had gotten a while back for the first time. I was experimenting with powder amounts and learned I needed to use more powder to get the shots to print closer to my point of aim. I didn’t turn in my target for score since I was just “playing.” I figured I’d let the more serious shooters worry about scores!

I was late arriving at the rifle shoot on Saturday. Since the match had already started, I wasn’t worried about joining in, especially since I brought the wrong rifle for the conditions. Had I paid attention, I would have known all the matches were being shot at 100 yards. The little 32-caliber squirrel rifle I brought is not a 100-yard match gun!

The guys have been having a smoothbore match after the regular rifle shoot and I did bring my Northwest trade gun, which is a 62-caliber (20 gauge) smoothbore. I won the first match but poor shooting in the second event had me finishing third for the aggregate. I still had fun!