Do it yourself caribou hunts.

[TommyBreaux]

My brother, I, two buddies just returned from a drop camp caribou hunt in unit 26B east of the Dalton Highway north of the Brooks mountain range in Alaska. The trip was awesome. Four of the five us got bulls. It was the hardest hunt of our lives from the stand point of walking the muskeg and the tundra.

Unfortunately the air service that we used was the most disorganized bunch of yahoos that I have ever come across. It turns out that you could not believe a word they told you. We should have known something was wrong when while waiting for our turn to fly out one of the pilots quit and told us in passing that the people in charge had no idea of what they were doing. As it turns out he was very right.

My advice to anyone who is going to do this is get more than one reference. My taxidermist has to be very lucky. Second make the air taxi give you an idea of how far he is going to be flying you to your hunting spot. (I have bought many first class tickets for trips all over the world.) On a cost per minute flying time this has to be the most expensive plane seat I ever bought. Third get the best set of hip boots you can that you walk a couple of miles in.

 

[FurTaker]

We were just there about 2 weeks before you. Which air taxi did you use because we had a very different experience. Aside from bad weather keeping us there an extra couple days we were overall happy with them. And it was just too foggy and rainy to fly cant exactly blame them for that

 

[TommyBreaux]

I'll tell you the outfitter we used in a PM. Contact me at [email protected].. Like I said, they were very disorganized. There were only a couple of days during our hunt when you couldn't or would not want to fly. We were told that if we got there a day early and the weather was good they would fly us out early. We got there two days early the weather was great and we waited around all day to fly out. The planes didn't move. We asked them if they were going to take us out later that day and they said "maybe". The plane flew out brought in a couple of hunters and that was all they did that day. So we wasted a whole day that was beautiful waiting for nothing. We had to wait until late the next afternoon before they flew us out. It wasn't that they were busy picking up and dropping off other hunters they just weren't flying. I don't think they did near enough for the money they charged to put us in front of the migration or even near it. We were almost exactly 15 miles from their base. From the vantage point near our camp site I would estimate that we could see 10-15 miles easily in any direction except to the west. We never saw more than 5 to 15 caribou at a time and they were always cows and calves and very small bulls. My companions were very lucky to get shots on the caribou that they took early in the hunt. After they killed the "resident" caribou bulls were very scarce. I am a very experienced hunter and a pretty successful hunter, and I hunted very hard. Until the last day of the hunt I only saw one really good bull and I had to cut my stalk on it off because the plane started flying in to pick us up and take us in. Of course if they had arrived in the morning to pick us up like they said they were I wouldn't have even see those bulls.
I am sour about them that is for sure.

What air service did you use?

Tommy Breaux

 

[FurTaker]

PM sent

 

[jeff 300]

I was up there a couple years ago which outfitter did you use. Your trip sound about like mine. we where out of kotzebue

 

[bretterath]

my hunt wasn't good either saw 3 paired cow/calf pairs and that was it. I hunted out of kotz as well.

 

[1100 Remington Man]

I went with these yahoo's as well and while the three of us shot three Caribou.
For what they provided they were way over priced and no nothing about Customer Service.
We were even asked if we wanted to bring up a 50 gallon barrel of Avgas, now let's think about this a 12 hour drive up the haul road that I have never been on with this in the back with the chance of Fire or spilling on my Sleeping Bag yea I would of liked to have smelled that for a week.
My experience was the same as Tommy's as we went to the same place.