Sometimes planning for a hunt can be tough

I don’t remember when planning a winter hunt was as complicated as this DC485 caribou hunt has become. I haven’t been on a lot of winter hunts, but I have done enough to realize this one seems different.

Back when I was working for Fish and Game in the mid-1990’s, a friend had a Tier 2 moose permit in GMU 16. He hadn’t been able to find time to use the permit until the last day it was valid. He asked if anybody wanted to go along. Nobody offered except me. I figured I could learn a few things from this guy because he had extensive snowmachining experience and had spent a lot of time in the backcountry.

I remember getting my snowmachine ready and filling two gas cans in case we really got far up the Yentna River. I took a lunch, hot drinks, a good pair of binoculars, meat processing gear, my sled, and my snowshoes, just in case. I dressed for the conditions, which this January day fluctuated between rainy drizzle and clear and colder.

We left our parking area around 8 am and traveled west to the Susitna River and up to the Yentna River. Once on the Yentna, we were in the Tier 2 hunt area. We came to the Big Bend section of the Yentna and found a group of moose. Kevin’s bull was on the ground by about 11 am. We gutted and cut up the animal, had lunch, and started the trip back by around 2:30 pm. I was running slower than Kevin on the ride back just to enjoy the now clear weather and great scenery. I was back in the parking lot by around 4:30 pm and loaded up and headed home.A quick and simple trip!

During the last year of the spike/fork bull moose hunt in GMU 14A, I was out on opening day in late November on my 4x4 ATV, with gear to handle a moose if I found one, but I really was going snowshoe hare hunting. Plan A fell apart when I found the Little Susitna River still had a lot of open water and I couldn’t cross, so I started slowly paralleling the river on the 4x4 to see what I could see. I hadn’t gone far when I spotted a forkhorn bull moose back in the edge of the trees about 90 yards away, watching me.

After I finally found the cartridges for my rifle in the four-wheeler bag, I was able to shoot the moose. The young bull was dead on the ground maybe 45-minutes from the time I had left the truck, parked about five miles away. I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening butchering the moose and hauling it and my hunting gear out of the field to the truck. It took two trips on a severely overloaded ATV to get everything out to the truck.

This was a second hunt where I had tried to anticipate what I might need and what might happen. Both hunts ended up being simple to plan for and easy to execute. Both hunts were local and the second person on the snowmachine hunt made light and quick work of butchering the moose and getting it out of the field.

This caribou hunt seems harder to get ready for. I had to get my snowmachine repaired and running, while dealing with a nonfunctioning winch on the flatbed trailer. With the snowmachine operable, I could use my covered utility trailer once I got it unstuck from the ground and the tires re-inflated (they were all quite soft). I also needed to install some “cleats” on the trailer ramp to give the snowmachine traction when climbing the ramp into the trailer.

I bought a good plastic sled for hauling a caribou (hopefully) and spent a couple of days mounting heavy-duty runners to the sled bottom. I had to heat the runners with a hot-air gun to bend them to conform to the sled, all while working in an unheated garage.

Then I had to sight in my rifle since I had some work done (restocking) since my September DC485 trip. As things went, the trigger became non-functional on the gun and I had to get it repaired. I finally got the rifle sighted in a couple of days ago. With only three weeks left to hunt, I hope the weather breaks for a few days and it isn’t -30 F when I go!