Kodiak Island, Alaska!

This May I got on as a packer with Dennis Harms, owner of Alaska Trophy Safaris on a Kodiak Island brown bear hunt. What an incredible experience! Here are a few photos of the hunt:

Here I am picking my nose before boarding the Beaver in Kodiak. I was sick the night before and had already "emptied out." It was not a pleasant flight.

I called shotgun and was pretty excited to see some country from the cockpit. I saw a lot of the plane floor between my knees. I was ok by the next morning, but it was a rotten start.

Here is base camp at the north end of Frazer lake. Notice the ice breaking up on the lake. In four days the ice that is six to eight inches thick in this picture would be gone completely.

The hunter arriving in the Beaver. It was sunny and blue skied every day I was on Kodiak!

This is spike camp early one morning, two and a half miles north of base camp.

Walt, the old bear guide. He's been at it for thirty-nine years. He is a soft spoken Kentukian farmer who has no front teeth, chews a couple bags of Redman a day, and drinks vodka like its water. We hit it off pretty well.

This is what we did twelve hours a day. The pipe was pleasant and we saw enough bears to keep us sharp.

Here is one of those Kodiak bruins. He won't set any records but he was pretty and blonde and close! The hunter, Josh, shot him from thirty yards and only six hundred yards from camp!

Walt and I are fleshing the hide with the mountain where we first saw the bear in the background. Josh first spotted him on top of the peak on the right and we watched him walk down through the snow drifts towards camp. We shot him at the base of the mountain just above Walt's head.

The thick, blonde hide. Very nice.

I was packing over a hundred pounds on the way out, but I'm not sure how much. I took my time.
At sixty-three years old, he sure packs his share!

Over all I had a helluva good time. I can't believe I got paid to do what I did. We finished on Kodiak early and I got back to Anchorage with a week left to spare. So I bought a black bear tag and headed up Eagle River trailhead with another packer from Kodiak. We saw more moose, goats, sheep and bears than we could keep track of and unfortunately I left my camera in Anchorage. It was an awesome five days and a completely different bear hunt than Kodiak. I can't wait to get back north.