Alaskan Brown bear hunting and Robert Ruark

You've seen the photos, now the tale of the tape on the recent Alaskan Brown Bear hunt: My dad shot a good representative male bear -- 8'6" (about 700lbs -- a total guess, based entirely on trying to drag the damn thing). He made a 500 yard stalk on a beach, steadied his rifle across a wobbly Swarvoski scope, and shot high at about 100 yards away. As the bear was turning to run, he refocused and dropped it cold with a shot that broke its neck and shoulder, and kicked it over backwards. Coming off of a double bypass just four months previous, the old man pulled it off without a hitch.

We stayed aboard The Bear, a fifty foot boat operated by Alaska Master Guide Brad Dennison of Alaska Coastal Outfitters. Brad ran the boat and guided my dad’s friend Nick most of the trip. Chet Benson of Bearfoot Adventures was our guide when my dad shot the bear. I've sworn not to tell where we hunted specifically, but I can say that we hunted the ABC Island area: Admiralty, Baranof and Chicagof.

I have day-to-day notes on the 10-day hunt that I plan to try to tie into a story I'm going to pitch to magazines at some point in the near future.

For most of the trip, I was reading Robert Ruark's Horn of the Hunter, a book about his safari in Africa. A lot of Ruark's observations seemed to apply to this trip as well. Selected excerpts below:

Every man has to brace a lion at least once in his life, and whether the lion is a woman or a boss or the prospect of death by disease makes no difference.

This one's for you Chester: According to what you may have seen or read, the basic idea of a professional hunter is roughly this: He stands about six foot five, sports a full beard, and is drunk (off his client's liquor) most of the time. He always makes a play for the client's beautiful wife or sister and always scores. He shoots lions with pistols and wrestles snakes and buffalo for fun. When he is not out on safari he hangs around bars in Nairobi, ogling the girls and thumbing the big cartridges he wears in the loops of his jacket. He does all the shooting for the client, while the client sits comfortably in the shooting car. He is always taciturn with a me-Tarzan-you-Jane manner. He has a secret sorrow which drove him to a life among the wild beasts. His business is regarded as butchery and it takes a superhuman man to be a competent butcher.

The truth: The heavy work for a hunter is not so much the location of game and the supervision of the final kill as the camp routine. He supervises a tiny portable city... He must be an expert mechanic -- he must be able to rebuild a motorcar from the spare parts he carries and improvise those parts he has not... The hunter finally combines the duties of sea captain, a bodyguard, a chauffer, a tracker, a skinner, a headwaiter, a tourist guide, a photographer, a mechanic, a stevedore, an interpreter, a game expert, a gin rummy partner, drinking companion, social equal, technical superior, boss, employee, and handyman.

Possibly the best argument for trophy hunting I've ever read: You are not shooting to kill. You are shooting to make immortal the thing you shoot. To kill just anything is a sin. To kill something that will be dead soon, but is so fine as to give you pleasure for years, is wonderful. Everything dies. You just hasten the process... I can understand killing something that you want so badly that you are willing to go to weeks of trouble and great expense to collect it, so that you will have it and enjoy it and remember it all your life.

This rings of Timothy Treadwell: I'll never make another one of these things where the first object is the camera, with nothing but dirty work to be done with the gun, mopping up after the humanitarians.

On coming home from a long trip: All the excitement and dangerous security were finished. Now it would be work and civilian frustration again. All the feeling of complete fatalism was gone. Now the future was in my hands again.

Old man and the bear -- Alaska homecoming

Hunting from shore, originally uploaded by mattstansberry.

Back to the real world. Check out more photos from the Alaskan Brown Bear hunting adventure.

Greetings from Sitka

On Alaskan safari for grizzly bear this week with my old man and his buddy Nick, so I will be incommunicado. We landed in Sitka yesterday and here are today's pics. See you all May 21st... I hope.

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Oregon turkey hunt turns into wildflower safari

I never got to detail last weekend's Oregon Outdoor Journal Fest. It started out with a trip down to see Mike Kaiser, a turkey hunting guide in the Medford area. Mike and I headed out at 4am to stalk Southern Oregon's booming turkey population. We hunted a private plot of oak savanna just east of town. As we were getting out of the truck, we could hear 10 turkeys, at least, gobbling up in the trees around us. We walked about a half mile, picked a good spot and sat there, listening. Mike started making some hen noises with a mouth call and a box call, and we were listening to the toms gobbling back at us. It seemed pretty much inevitable that I was going to shoot a bird that morning. Unfortunately, we misjudged how far away the turkey we were focusing on was. It was practically on the next ridge over, but its call was carrying pretty far. Once we realized that the bird wasn't getting any closer, we pulled up stakes and moved. We hiked back and forth across miles of rolling hills, stopping to call periodically. We had a lot of birds responding to us, but none coming in. The closest we came was a pair of jakes (juvenile male turkeys) that seemed to be shadowing us, but eventually they ran off over the next ridge, still calling at us the whole time. During the course of the morning we saw tons of wildflowers and had great views of Mt. McGloughlin. Pictures below:

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April fly fishing around Eugene Oregon

I never got back to explaining what was working on the Middle Fork of the Willamette a couple weeks back like I promised. Well, here it is. We spent most of the morning banging the bottom with a two-nymph rig -- couple leggy stoneflies and mega-princes. Our guide had a cool way of tying the indicator to the butt section of the leader and another knot directly to the indicator to make sure it drifted straight down. Picked up a lot of fish in deeper runs -- seams near the bank. Later in the day we were swinging soft hackles across the middle, brownish size 12s. Two flies per rig, and fish hit on both flies. The upper fly was attached way up, using stiff 2x to make it stick out and avoid tangling with the leader. Big day.

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Then the next day we headed to the McKenzie River with Big Al and posse from Trout Unlimited Chapter TU 678. We saw a ton of bugs, some steelhead smolts and not much else. We caught about 6 cutthroat trout that collectively measured about 30 inches. Check out the full monty on the TU Chapter 678 blog.