I have often heard it said that getting a moose on the ground is the easy part. Until this September I didn’t fully understand.



Denali and the Alaska Range from the north



After a very long absence from hunting large game I finally made up my mind to trade some fall fishing time for time in the woods trying to put some red meat in the freezer. As with many thing new and complex, the learning curve in moose hunting has been fairly flat for me. Without a mentor or more experienced folks to tag along with, I’ve been to trying and pick up tidbits of info here and there, glean some knowledge when the rare opportunity presents, but more than anything I’ve had to try and keep my head up while outdoors and learn the lessons that only careful observation can teach.




Preseason scouting and polishing up spotting skills.




I grew up hunting whitetail in the Midwest and that turned into my main outdoor pursuit for many of my formative years while working on farms in Wisconsin. I had an incredible mentor, an uncle that took me under his wing and showed me the what, when, and where. We were fairly proficient at harvesting each fall and bowhunting was a logical progression after a few years of slinging a rifle around. After a few bow seasons spent fruitlessly in treestands and cornfields and a few blown chances I finally connected and that experience remains one of my most memorable to date.

After moving to Washington state by myself at the age of eighteen I functionally tabled hunting altogether and have focused more on adventures involving mountain tops and rivers since.

Getting back in the saddle. Compared to deer moose are very different creatures indeed. Most of what I thought I knew about finding deer has little relevance in the domain of moose. There are some similarities I guess. Moose tend to sleep in the thick stuff, tend eat in the open, and congregate in the fall for the rut and so on. More than logical travel paths hunting moose seems to be all about real estate. The more you can see and effectively hunt the better your chances. The terrain and their movement patterns are on a much larger scale than anything I’ve tried to hunt before and being a fairly nocturnal animal for most of the “warm” season certainly doesn't make strategy development an easy task.





Typical landscape on the southern slope of the Alaska Range.







Moving over the high passes towards the north side of the range.

















For reasons I’ll elaborate on as the story unfolds I wasn’t able to devote much time to capturing quality images on this trip and the photo record is pretty incomplete. I’ve tried to cobble together some of the useable images from the hunt itself but you’ll have to bear with some crappy cell phone pics and blurry stuff as that is for the most part what I’ve got. You’ll also see a few re-treads if you’ve had a look at any of the fall related posts in the Fin’s and Feather’s forum recently.

Fall in Alaska is short but beautifully intense. It seems like almost overnight the trees and tundra light up with color and the landscape takes on a majestic vibrance no artist or photographer, or story teller can convey. The last two years I’ve hunted on the north side of the Alaska Range shares more topographical characteristics with the interior and northern part of the state as compared to the south side of the range which is heavily vegetated and home to nasty things like Devil’s Club and Slide Alder. The north side of the range tends to be wide open with tundra being the predominate vegetation. Smaller stands of spruce, birch, cottonwood, alder, and aspen fill in the river and creek bottoms. The landscape is generally rolling hills with long rounded and sweeping ridges. Cross-country travel is straightforward but walking the grassy hummocks and swamps in the lower elevations can be tedious if not strenuous. Moose habitat abounds.


More sparsely treed tundra landscape on the north side of the range





Spruce lined river valleys with willow banks are a favorite for moose in all seasons













To be continued.

Good appetizer.

I'm hooked on this book Coley!!

Looking forward to the rest.

The Coley Chronicles Continue...

Moose.


These creatures were made for the landscape they inhabit and they move about effortlessly in stuff that would slow most of us to the pace of a crawl. A mature bull can stand over six feet tall at the back and weigh over 1500 pounds. Their long muscular legs legs and large feet equip a highly efficient all terrain vehicle affectionately referred to as the Swamp Donkey. Despite their docile reputation they can sport quite an attitude. I’ve seen a moderately sized cow fend off a full sized brown bear and have had to run and hide from more than once from pissed of moose while stomping around local criks in the summer.



















One of the confounding things about moose is that you seem to always see them when you aren’t looking, hunting especially. More than once I’ve returned from a day of hunting where I haven’t seen an animal only to find a moose standing in my yard or driveway. The big bulls also have a way of materializing shortly after the season has ended.



Boris, one of our yard bulls. If he sprouts two more brow tines and sticks around till next year. He’ll be in the freezer.



After my first serious effort last year which ended empty handed I went back to work and the two following days I had to chase legal bulls out of the 4-wheeler trail so I could carry on. Where were you yesterday… During the general season most game management units here have antlers restrictions and a legal bull is one that is sporting either a spike, fork, antlers with a 50-inch or greater spread, or specified number of brow tines (3 or 4). In other words a legal bull in a given area would be a spike/fork/50 or 4, spike/fork/50 or three etc. Some units with more healthy populations are “any bull” areas and the last two years I’ve traveled a ways from home to hunt one of these hoping for slightly better odds.


Moose aren't the only critters wandering around in the woods here.



















I consider last season as my first real effort as it was the first year I really devoted a chunk of time to putting myself in the right place at the right time with the resources needed to pull off a successful hunt. I had two very legitimate chances, neither of which wound up panning out. Without turning either of those events into stories in their own right, the first chance was blown on day one of a four day hunt where I’d spotted two bulls just as darkness was setting in. I closed the distance but they were still too far off as the shooting light faded. Unfortunately they never showed themselves again before I had to go.












A week or two later I had a free day closer to home and we’d called in a sub-legal bull that was short a brow tine to make legal. While we were calling him another bull had responded farther down the valley and we went after him. After an hour he still wouldn’t but from a heavily vegetated ravine so I went in. He busted me at 40 yards and bolted. He was massive, I was heart broken.




To say the season ended with me still wanting one terribly is a huge understatement.


Safe, until next year.




To be continued.

I can related to the headgear legalese. Just returned from playing elk hide-n-seek. Saw calves, cows, and a dandy bull with too many points. Patiently waiting for the remainder of your pixels & prose....

You have an amazing talent with words and photos, Coley. You set a painfully high bar on this site that few will ever achieve.

Great read and great photos as always.

I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to hear the rest!

Thanks for the very kind words there Mr. Parker.

Sorry for the delay on the next installment. I'll try and get it together at some point later today. This whole being a dad thing certainly doesn't leave me with the discretionary time I once had.

Great work Coley. I'm looking forward to the rest of the adventure.

As am I!

Warning, the next installment or two will be heavier on words than quality pics. As mentioned previously, I came up kinda short on photo documentation from this point in the hunt on and so I will have to fill in some of the gaps with more typing than I would like.

Moose Hunting in Alaska is a huge deal. Without knowing the real numbers I would say that amongst residents it is likely the most largely participated outdoor activity in the state. It is not uncommon for folks to take the entire month of September off to hunt, cashing in all of their annual vacation days to do so. For days, even a week or two before the season opens the highways are choked with trucks and trailers towing all manner of all terrain vehicles, boats, and cargo all headed for moose country. The airports big and small are alive with hunters heavily laden with boxes and bags shuttling load after load into and out of the backcountry.

Many families both rural, urban, and of course in the villages count on moose meat to sustain them for the year and getting a moose isn’t a luxury, it is a necessity. There are hunters that come here looking for a trophy but they are the vast minority. Most are looking to grocery shop and my party of three would all say we are part of that category. Not that any of us mind a souvenir, but meat has been and will remain the primary objective. Having picked an any bull area we were all of the mindset that if it had antlers, we’d try and put it down.

Despite the vast size of the state it can be surprisingly hard to find grade A real estate that is unoccupied especially in those places that are more easily and cheaply accessed. Many of the prime spots close to a town, road, or a landing strip have been hunted by the same families for generations and barging in as a new comer doesn’t fly.

As with most things, the farther you go and the harder it is to get there, the better the conditions (in this case hunting) tends to be. After a few years of trying to make it happen closer to home I put together a plan to get a little deeper into the backcountry this year hoping that some more travel time and effort invested would pay dividends. It certainly did and I’ll try and tell that part of the story now.

Between August 20th and the first week in October I spent three days at home and most of those were spent doing the duffel shuffle, that is unpacking one bag to repack another in preparation for a hasty departure. Most of what I do for fun and work keeps me outside and on the go and this year was no exception, not that many of the days in that time frame were days off. I pooled most of the time off I could wrangle towards the end of September and wound up with a total of five days I could spend hunting. Not much by most serious moose hunter’s standards but when you don’t have a choice, the choosin is easy.


Busting butt late in the day to the trailhead. Go time.

I got done working late in the day and hit the road hoping to get to a camping spot a few miles down the trail where I could hunt the morning before my two hunting partners showed up. Their drive to the trailhead was considerably longer and I’d planned to rendezvous with them mid-day on the trail after having hunted that morning while they drove. When time is limited you gotta make the most of every minute. That theme would continue over the next few days.


Things you see closer to the trailhead.




Lots of push, pull and drag in this sort of cross-country travel.



The spot I had picked for us was near a fairly heavily use road corridor with many side trails branching off of the main valley and up adjacent valleys and terrain features. Most of the activity is in the first 5 miles of trail. Beyond that point things start to get serious with two major river crossings, swamps, bogs, and the potential for a long and really ugly walk back if things go wrong, which they often do in these environments. In total our trip out would take about 10 hours and cover 18 miles of pretty rough country but in the end we would wind up on a hilltop with no other camps in sight and miles of prime real estate to glass to our hearts content. Bueno.





The trip out went fairly well. We were able to find a decent spot to ford both rivers despite fairly high water. The butt pucker factor was there, but we managed not to get swept into the angry canyon a few bends below our crossing point. We got stuck and had to winch a handful of times, blew up a wheel on the Argo but eventually arrived at a suitable camp spot with a few hours of light to spare. We hurried about pitching tents and dumping gear in a pile and made a plan to hunt the remainder of the evening. From our camp spot I would head up to a high ridge a mile away, Tim would head downhill to glass the substantial valley bottom below, and Matt would stay at camp and glass a bowl and valley to the west. It all looked good.



Years of reading water from boats and river banks comes in handy when 4-wheeling as well.






What was about to unfold was unquestionably the most memorable hunting experience of my life and trying to put the confluence of emotions and the physical and mental aspects of the experience into words will undoubtedly prove futile. I’ll try just the same.

From camp I hopped on my 4-wheeler and headed up a long broad slope that eventually culminated in a sweeping ridge that dropped away on one end into a substantial river valley. The other end of the ridge tapered into a narrow pass and then formed again on the other side of the pass and ran for many miles in the other direction. The ride up took half an hour, maybe a bit less. It was slow and jarring but straightforward. Once on the crest of the ridge I chose a spot where I could overlook the narrow pass as it seemed to be a natural funnel from the thick spruce forest on the south side of the ridge and the open meadow and creek bottom to the north.

As soon as I steadied myself for a quick look I spotted a cow and a calf in the bowl to the north of the narrow pass. Good news. Still a fair amount of light left and moose were already on the move. I had a seat and studied the terrain more closely for what seemed like a long time. For as big as they are I am always amazed at how little cover a moose needs to remain hidden. I’ve stared at the same hillside for hours only to have multiple moose appear from nowhere in what seems like sparse vegetation that you could easily pick them out of. Careful and relentless observation is a must though sometimes they just barge right out into the open and you seem them coming a mile away.


Back on track. I studied the surroundings for a while longer and eventually started making some calls and raking. Absent any real brush on the ridge top I used a moose shoulder blade on the gravel and lichen covered rocks and it seemed to sound good enough. I raked for a while and got impatient as I always do. Patience is one of my great weaknesses when it comes to hunting if I haven’t mentioned that already.

I had to go for a walk and see what the other end of the ridge had to offer. I left my spot on foot and walked maybe a mile down the ridge to a point where I could see some very different terrain in the opposite direction. No sooner had I stopped to glass I picked up three cows coming out of a stand of spruce maybe a mile below. Another one joined them a short time later. I watched and watched and nothing with antlers materialized. Getting impatient again I made up my mind to head back to my starting point to see if anything had responded to the calling I’d done earlier.

Maybe halfway back to my wheeler walking along the narrow ridge crest I caught a white flash out of the corner of my eye from somewhere far below in the spruce. I paused for a moment not wanting to lose whatever it was in my peripheral vision. As I stopped the white object was still there but it moved and disappeared while I remained motionless. Antler. I dropped to the ground and put the binos to my eyes scanning where it seemed like the flash had come from. Within a few seconds I spotted a cow picking her way through the spruce and a short distance behind her, a bull, hot on her heels and sick with, um, love? They were headed, I hoped, for the narrow pass that lead out of the spruce and into the bowl beyond. There was a chance that I could intercept them as they crossed the pass, but I was way out of position and there was no guarantee that they were going to pop out in the one spot where I might have a brief chance at a shot. I had to try.

They were a long way off but every step I took and every step they took brought us closer together and I had to wait until they were briefly hidden from view to move. As fast as I could in this start-stop fashion I eventually moved out of view to the north side of the ridge crest and sprinted as fast as I could for the pass which was still more than a quarter of a mile away. Light was fading fast.

Oh man, this is getting good Coley!

Anybody can post pics of a trip Coley, but for me most of the visual comes from your words.

Kind of like those Penthouse Forum articles. "I never thought I'd be writing a letter like this....."

Better hurry up with your next installment or they'll clear the pass before you can head 'em off.

We'll see if I can carve out a bit of time this evening to get this ramble wrapped up.

yes please

From the ridge tops looking north.



After what seemed like an eternity but in reality was only a few minutes I reached the knoll at the end of the ridge that overlooked the small pass. Out of breath, sweating, my heart beating in my ears and adrenaline doing what it does I tried to pick up the pair of moose again. When I had last seen them they were still headed in the general direction of the pass but there was no guarantee that they would wind up following a trail that led that way. The area I expected them to be moving through was too dense to pick them out but after a few seconds of listening I heard the bull grunting and cooing still obviously hot on the heels of the cow.




Looking back towards camp from the crest of the ridge.




From where it sounded like they were I was fairly confident they would cross the pass and if they did there was a decent chance I’d get a shot at them as long as they weren’t in the heavily brushed bottom. My dilemma was this, I was still too far away for a reasonable shot but to get any closer I had to lose elevation continuing down the ridge. The lower I got the less I could see and the more the tree tops rose up to obscure my vision and shooting lanes. Down the ridge I went as quickly as I could without making too much noise all the while not knowing if I would find an alley where I could see the moose on the adjacent slope or if I would run myself out of terrain and miss them as they crossed the pass and dropped into the creek bottom never to be seen again.

I got as low as I thought I could and found a narrow lane between two large spruce trees that afforded me a decent view of the slope on the other side of the pass. I still hadn’t seen the moose but I could still hear the bull grunting as they came. With my heart in my throat I sat and waited. Again probably mere seconds passed but the time felt measured in hours. With the safety off and rifle at the ready I kept an eye on the narrow lane and soon enough the cow stepped out. I aimed in drew a breath and waited. The field of view I had was narrow and within a step or two the cow was gone. I stayed aimed in and right on cue the bull stepped out broadside and moving quickly. I don’t remember taking the shot as I had no real time to think about it. I had put the crosshairs where they needed to be and had made up my mind that as soon as he stepped out the shot had to go off. And so it went.

I saw him hunch through the scope before he took two quick steps and disappeared from view. I waited and listened. Nothing. The shot had frozen the handful of cows that were now in the open meadow below and the silence was deafening. After a minute or two the cows began to move again and didn’t generally seem to be bothered by anything that had happened.

I left my spot on the right and battled through alder and willow until I reached the bottom of the pass and started picking my way up the other side. Once in the neighborhood of where I thought he should be if he was down I walked in circles for another eternity and was beginning to lose hope. And then, just a few steps from where I had last seen him from the ridge, there he was.

It would be impossible to describe the wave of euphoria that washed over me and I think something to the effect of “no [Bleeeeep!] way” came out of my mouth. I don’t think I was in disbelief that the round had found it’s mark as much as I couldn’t believe it had all come together. There were so many ways that the whole situation could have, should have gone wrong from barely seeing him in the first place to then having him follow the only path that would offer me a shot to then have the shot work out in such a narrow window to get it off. It was an amazing feeling, but one I didn’t have much time to enjoy.





My moose after we all made our way back up the hill.











I squeezed off two quick rounds, a prearranged signal to my other two teammates that meant “moose down” and marked the spot on my GPS, something that I didn’t realize the value of at the time. I fought my way back through the brush and ran up the ridge as quickly as I could. Once back at the 4-wheeler I ran it back to camp as fast as I could reasonably make it go through the relatively rough terrain.

Matt was there and had heard the shots. We exchanged a few quick words but were both feeling the pressure of having a moose down a long ways from camp, with many hours of work to do in what would soon become lightless predator country. I continued downhill from camp to where I thought Tim would be set up but he was nowhere to be found. After a few minutes of looking and listening now with only remnants of light left I opened my mouth to holler Tim’s name and before I could get the word out his rifle cracked in the distance.




Darkness was upon us





I headed in the general direction of the shot and a short time later, now officially dark, I found Tim working his way towards a large set of antlers I could see laying on the ground a short distance beyond.





Returning to gut Tim's moose after bagging and hanging mine






We shared a massive man hug and were both still shaking from adrenaline. Without much ado the elation turned into realization of the enormity of the task that lay ahead. Having been on the go for over 18 hours, already exhausted, with two moose on the ground, at dark in the middle of BFE…

The easy part was over.




(one more installment to go, ill try to keep it brief)