My apologies in advance, but I've decided to subject you all to my hunt journaling. Hopefully someone finds it informative or useful but lord knows I could use the writing practice.
A friend of mine who is new to hunting and to southeast Alaska wanted to try some early season blacktail so we planned a trip out of Juneau for the open of 'Any Deer' season (September 15th) just to make sure she'd have a better shot at harvesting one.
We took a hop over to Young Lake through Ward Air, a 15-20 minute flight in the old classic, a DeHavilland DHC-2 Beaver. We were lucky to fly out in a rare window of good weather with nice views of the Douglas Channel and Juneau area
(Outer Point and Shaman Island Pictured)
We got dropped off at noon at the US Forest Service cabin at the south end of the lake, a reasonably furnished and well maintained Panabode cabin with two rowboats. Based on the topography and aerial imagery we had reviewed beforehand, we decided to cross the lake with a boat and ascend immediately to the alpine, with the plan being to camp above treeline and hunt from there. The path we selected was approximately 2 miles in length and ascended 2000 feet through sitka spruce, alpine hemlock, and yellow cedar overstory with a very primordial looking blueberry/devils club/skunk cabbage/huckleberry/fern understory. Unfortunately we made the mistake of crossing a stretch that had appeared to be open in the satelline photos and ended up spending about an hour getting thoroughly scratched up bashing through heavy salmonberry brush, a mistake I should have seen and avoided having done the same thing on more than one occasion in the past.
As is pretty typical for southeast this time of year, we saw a few well trodden tracks around the lake (at 400 feet), then only a few lightly used deer tracks between the lake and 2000 feet. As we trudged higher on the ridgeline, all of these trails began to coalesce into well used deer highways and the abundance of sign spurred us on despite the steep aspect of the hike. We reached the alpine at 2400 feet in approximately 4 hours, around 5 pm, and began to set up camp above a small alpine lake just above treeline. We quickly threw up the tent, filled it with all our non-essentials, hung the food bag, and repacked for a quick bout of hunting before the impending sunset.
Departing from camp, we ascended the ridge from 2400 to 2800 feet, where the approach to eagle peak (top right in above photo) leveled out some and the alpine spread out a bit on either side of the ridgeline. Hiking up over fresh prints along a well used muddy deer track, I whispered to my hunting partner that it was time to start being quiet (there had previously been much cursing of the salmonberries) and that we were sure to see deer any minute. Unfortunately due to the narrowness of the ridge we couldn't help skylining ourselves but did our best (for what little help it was) to move slowly and carefully.
Surely enough, we crested a false peak and I stopped, backing down to bring my head below the sightline of the two deer bedded into a small ridge extending from the right side of the one we were on. I gestured to my parter to remove her pack (a dark solid color much to my chagrin) and crawl with me to the top of the false peak. We crept up the ledge and were able to assess that our deer hadn't spotted my careless movement and got into position for what I ranged as an 86 yard shot onto a small spike buck and a doe.
My hunting partner had never shot a large game animal before and was using a gorgeous heirloom 1957 Winchester Model 70 chambered in 270 Win and shooting factory Hornady ammo. I, being imminently vulnerable to hype, was shooting a 7 Sherman Short that I had just finished assembling and was loaded with 155 grain Hammer Hunters. I waited while my partner took a full broadside shot into the doe, and watched her tumble down the backside of the little ridge before slipping my own round into the crease behind the little bucks shoulder as he trotted over the hill after starting at the retort. I had been ready to follow up her shot but she ended up needing no such assistance.
We had decided to try for 2 each, as that was about the maximum we figured we could carry back down the mountain and we were off to an excellent start no more than 30 minutes into the hunt!
After marking the expected position of our two deer on the gps, we continued on the main ridge up to its junction with the smaller one our deer had been on. Reaching the junction, I again motioned for my partner to get low as we had stumbled on ANOTHER set of deer only a single ridge further out. After a quick, whispered discussion, we made the move to try to complete our self imposed bag limit (the actual limit is six in this unit) and again crawled up the ridge. This time my partner took a shot on the larger deer, a doe, at 121 yards and I followed up on the does spike buck companion as he ran at around 240. None of the deer made it more than 100 yards from where they were shot. One shot was a touch high on the does back but certainly did the job.
With waning light, we made the decision to gut all of the deer, and hang them from the edge of a nearby cliff until the following morning when we would have enough light to finish butchering them. After an hour and a half of feverish work, and a few carelessly self inflicted cuts in my hurry, we hiked back by headlamp in the dark and enjoyed a well deserved hot dinner before crawling in to sleep.
The following morning we slept in, feeling comfortable in having already finished all the hunting we had set out to do. Upon arriving back at our deer around nine however, we discovered that the cliff over which we'd hung the deer was not quiiiiite steep enough, and the smaller doe was missing entirely, having been absconded with in the night by one of the islands many bruins
After a brief period of mourning and a few choice words, we broke down the remaining deer into quarters and hiked them down to camp, where they were hung considerably higher this time from the tallest hemlock we could find nearby.
Not quite exhausted and not quite satisfied that we we're maxed out in our carrying capacity, we decided to do one more evening of hunting and went back up the ridge, passing the now empty openings where we had shot deer the previous day and continuing on up to 3000 feet
Resting upon a false peak, we spotted down in the valley to our left a potential culprit of our deer theft, a large darkly-coated boar. He was busily raking his way through a patch of alpine blueberries like a large, furry combine about 800 yards down in the valley below. I had the relevant bear tag on me but didn't relish the work of hiking down to him and then having to work our way back up with the skull and hide. A rough estimate with my reticle put him at about 9 feet nose to tail.
Luckily for us, he showed no interest in our activities and continued his merry way along the valley floor.
Shortly after moving on, I spotted another deer, atop the same ridgeline as us where it curved around to the left. A few unsuccessful attempts were made to point him out to my buddy as I ranged him at 416 yards and set up for a shot. Unfortunately it appeared he had spotted us, perhaps even before we spotted him, as he was frozen facing us from his perch atop the hill. I'm still not sure if it was because we skylined ourselves crossing a section of ridge or if he picked out the dark backpack moving towards him but we didn't feel confident we could close the gap without spooking him and my partner told me to just take the shot.
This was a new personal long shot for me and I got comfortable in a nice prone position using a bipod and spare jacket as a rear rest, squeezing off a shot with a 14 inch holdover and 2 inch left hold to account for the mild breeze blowing intermittently across the east/west ridge we were on from the south. I watched through the scope as he started, turned, and disappeared over the top of the ridge behind him.
At the sound of my shot, 2 previously unnoticed does departed their hidden beds around 250 yards ahead of us and also ran over the ridge. We watched them rapidly slip out of sight, hoping that I'd dropped the buck and we hadnt just wasted our chance at a closer shot.
Praying that I hadn't knocked my scope too badly during any of our previous scrambles, we made out way sidehilling across the top of the valley, finally scrambling up a near vertical section of slippery rock below where had been perched. Finding his former location, I was disappointed to find no blood as every knock and fall my rifle had previously endured flashed through my head like a slideshow. Luckily a quick review of the surround area found him piled up in the short, scraggly hemlock atop a cliff about 50 yards from where I'd shot him.
The shot had hit him just left of center in the chest, breaking the right glenohumeral joint and continuing through the lungs and body cavity with the bullet being discovered lodged near his back right hip after miraculously not puncturing anything below the diaphragm.
We hurriedly cleaned and quartered him and brought him back down to our camp, this time crossing over the nob between his location and our firing position instead of across it, and neatly making it over all of the steep slopes, knife edges, and scrambles before the light faded and making it to camp just as it became necessary to use our headlamps.
The following day (after again miraculously getting to sleep in on a hunting trip), we broke camp and began to pick our way the remaining 2000 feet down to the lake. Our good luck with weather had run out and we were thouroughly mired in fog and rain but we were still in high spirits from the sucessful hunt and previous nice weather. This time we managed to avoid any brushes (if you'll pardon the pun) with the salmonberries and had a much easier time of things, although a strap broke on my pack and eventually resulted in me needing to be tied into the darn thing. Inevitably, I tripped over some windfall on the way down and ended up upside down on the hill, firmly anchored in place by the two deer in my pack and now securely tied to my pack, or it to me depending on your perspective. After some well deserved mocking, my buddy was kind enough to free me and we continued the last leg down with only some minor bruising to my body and my ego. I apologize but no one remembered in the moment to take a picture.
Reaching the bottom of the hill in about 3.5 hours, I rowed us back across the lake and we finally got to enjoy the luxury of the cabin we had so optimistically rented for the weekend. The weather having cleared, we hung the meat under the boat shed and settled in to wait for our flight out the following morning. We had some time to reflect on our oversights, like a lack of camp shoes to replace our wet and muddy boots around the cabin and we were particularly bemoaning our failure to bring a packable fly rod as we watched cutthroat sip emerging flies off the surface of the lake. There's always something to do better next time.
All said, it was a relatively easy and straightforward hunt. Total costs were $735 for the flight, $131 for the cabin for three days, and then consumables like ammo and food. We were limited to 800 pounds of people and cargo each way and we were about 450# between us and food/gear so 4 deer or 2 deer + one bear seemed pretty reasonable for a maximum harvest. There were also more blueberries than you could possibly harvest and pretty dense concentrations of winter chantarelles and hedgehog mushrooms to supplement the deer. For the record, we did mark and report 5 tags total, including the deer lost to bears.
A friend of mine who is new to hunting and to southeast Alaska wanted to try some early season blacktail so we planned a trip out of Juneau for the open of 'Any Deer' season (September 15th) just to make sure she'd have a better shot at harvesting one.
We took a hop over to Young Lake through Ward Air, a 15-20 minute flight in the old classic, a DeHavilland DHC-2 Beaver. We were lucky to fly out in a rare window of good weather with nice views of the Douglas Channel and Juneau area
(Outer Point and Shaman Island Pictured)
We got dropped off at noon at the US Forest Service cabin at the south end of the lake, a reasonably furnished and well maintained Panabode cabin with two rowboats. Based on the topography and aerial imagery we had reviewed beforehand, we decided to cross the lake with a boat and ascend immediately to the alpine, with the plan being to camp above treeline and hunt from there. The path we selected was approximately 2 miles in length and ascended 2000 feet through sitka spruce, alpine hemlock, and yellow cedar overstory with a very primordial looking blueberry/devils club/skunk cabbage/huckleberry/fern understory. Unfortunately we made the mistake of crossing a stretch that had appeared to be open in the satelline photos and ended up spending about an hour getting thoroughly scratched up bashing through heavy salmonberry brush, a mistake I should have seen and avoided having done the same thing on more than one occasion in the past.
As is pretty typical for southeast this time of year, we saw a few well trodden tracks around the lake (at 400 feet), then only a few lightly used deer tracks between the lake and 2000 feet. As we trudged higher on the ridgeline, all of these trails began to coalesce into well used deer highways and the abundance of sign spurred us on despite the steep aspect of the hike. We reached the alpine at 2400 feet in approximately 4 hours, around 5 pm, and began to set up camp above a small alpine lake just above treeline. We quickly threw up the tent, filled it with all our non-essentials, hung the food bag, and repacked for a quick bout of hunting before the impending sunset.
Departing from camp, we ascended the ridge from 2400 to 2800 feet, where the approach to eagle peak (top right in above photo) leveled out some and the alpine spread out a bit on either side of the ridgeline. Hiking up over fresh prints along a well used muddy deer track, I whispered to my hunting partner that it was time to start being quiet (there had previously been much cursing of the salmonberries) and that we were sure to see deer any minute. Unfortunately due to the narrowness of the ridge we couldn't help skylining ourselves but did our best (for what little help it was) to move slowly and carefully.
Surely enough, we crested a false peak and I stopped, backing down to bring my head below the sightline of the two deer bedded into a small ridge extending from the right side of the one we were on. I gestured to my parter to remove her pack (a dark solid color much to my chagrin) and crawl with me to the top of the false peak. We crept up the ledge and were able to assess that our deer hadn't spotted my careless movement and got into position for what I ranged as an 86 yard shot onto a small spike buck and a doe.
My hunting partner had never shot a large game animal before and was using a gorgeous heirloom 1957 Winchester Model 70 chambered in 270 Win and shooting factory Hornady ammo. I, being imminently vulnerable to hype, was shooting a 7 Sherman Short that I had just finished assembling and was loaded with 155 grain Hammer Hunters. I waited while my partner took a full broadside shot into the doe, and watched her tumble down the backside of the little ridge before slipping my own round into the crease behind the little bucks shoulder as he trotted over the hill after starting at the retort. I had been ready to follow up her shot but she ended up needing no such assistance.
We had decided to try for 2 each, as that was about the maximum we figured we could carry back down the mountain and we were off to an excellent start no more than 30 minutes into the hunt!
After marking the expected position of our two deer on the gps, we continued on the main ridge up to its junction with the smaller one our deer had been on. Reaching the junction, I again motioned for my partner to get low as we had stumbled on ANOTHER set of deer only a single ridge further out. After a quick, whispered discussion, we made the move to try to complete our self imposed bag limit (the actual limit is six in this unit) and again crawled up the ridge. This time my partner took a shot on the larger deer, a doe, at 121 yards and I followed up on the does spike buck companion as he ran at around 240. None of the deer made it more than 100 yards from where they were shot. One shot was a touch high on the does back but certainly did the job.
With waning light, we made the decision to gut all of the deer, and hang them from the edge of a nearby cliff until the following morning when we would have enough light to finish butchering them. After an hour and a half of feverish work, and a few carelessly self inflicted cuts in my hurry, we hiked back by headlamp in the dark and enjoyed a well deserved hot dinner before crawling in to sleep.
The following morning we slept in, feeling comfortable in having already finished all the hunting we had set out to do. Upon arriving back at our deer around nine however, we discovered that the cliff over which we'd hung the deer was not quiiiiite steep enough, and the smaller doe was missing entirely, having been absconded with in the night by one of the islands many bruins
After a brief period of mourning and a few choice words, we broke down the remaining deer into quarters and hiked them down to camp, where they were hung considerably higher this time from the tallest hemlock we could find nearby.
Not quite exhausted and not quite satisfied that we we're maxed out in our carrying capacity, we decided to do one more evening of hunting and went back up the ridge, passing the now empty openings where we had shot deer the previous day and continuing on up to 3000 feet
Resting upon a false peak, we spotted down in the valley to our left a potential culprit of our deer theft, a large darkly-coated boar. He was busily raking his way through a patch of alpine blueberries like a large, furry combine about 800 yards down in the valley below. I had the relevant bear tag on me but didn't relish the work of hiking down to him and then having to work our way back up with the skull and hide. A rough estimate with my reticle put him at about 9 feet nose to tail.
Luckily for us, he showed no interest in our activities and continued his merry way along the valley floor.
Shortly after moving on, I spotted another deer, atop the same ridgeline as us where it curved around to the left. A few unsuccessful attempts were made to point him out to my buddy as I ranged him at 416 yards and set up for a shot. Unfortunately it appeared he had spotted us, perhaps even before we spotted him, as he was frozen facing us from his perch atop the hill. I'm still not sure if it was because we skylined ourselves crossing a section of ridge or if he picked out the dark backpack moving towards him but we didn't feel confident we could close the gap without spooking him and my partner told me to just take the shot.
This was a new personal long shot for me and I got comfortable in a nice prone position using a bipod and spare jacket as a rear rest, squeezing off a shot with a 14 inch holdover and 2 inch left hold to account for the mild breeze blowing intermittently across the east/west ridge we were on from the south. I watched through the scope as he started, turned, and disappeared over the top of the ridge behind him.
At the sound of my shot, 2 previously unnoticed does departed their hidden beds around 250 yards ahead of us and also ran over the ridge. We watched them rapidly slip out of sight, hoping that I'd dropped the buck and we hadnt just wasted our chance at a closer shot.
Praying that I hadn't knocked my scope too badly during any of our previous scrambles, we made out way sidehilling across the top of the valley, finally scrambling up a near vertical section of slippery rock below where had been perched. Finding his former location, I was disappointed to find no blood as every knock and fall my rifle had previously endured flashed through my head like a slideshow. Luckily a quick review of the surround area found him piled up in the short, scraggly hemlock atop a cliff about 50 yards from where I'd shot him.
The shot had hit him just left of center in the chest, breaking the right glenohumeral joint and continuing through the lungs and body cavity with the bullet being discovered lodged near his back right hip after miraculously not puncturing anything below the diaphragm.
We hurriedly cleaned and quartered him and brought him back down to our camp, this time crossing over the nob between his location and our firing position instead of across it, and neatly making it over all of the steep slopes, knife edges, and scrambles before the light faded and making it to camp just as it became necessary to use our headlamps.
The following day (after again miraculously getting to sleep in on a hunting trip), we broke camp and began to pick our way the remaining 2000 feet down to the lake. Our good luck with weather had run out and we were thouroughly mired in fog and rain but we were still in high spirits from the sucessful hunt and previous nice weather. This time we managed to avoid any brushes (if you'll pardon the pun) with the salmonberries and had a much easier time of things, although a strap broke on my pack and eventually resulted in me needing to be tied into the darn thing. Inevitably, I tripped over some windfall on the way down and ended up upside down on the hill, firmly anchored in place by the two deer in my pack and now securely tied to my pack, or it to me depending on your perspective. After some well deserved mocking, my buddy was kind enough to free me and we continued the last leg down with only some minor bruising to my body and my ego. I apologize but no one remembered in the moment to take a picture.
Reaching the bottom of the hill in about 3.5 hours, I rowed us back across the lake and we finally got to enjoy the luxury of the cabin we had so optimistically rented for the weekend. The weather having cleared, we hung the meat under the boat shed and settled in to wait for our flight out the following morning. We had some time to reflect on our oversights, like a lack of camp shoes to replace our wet and muddy boots around the cabin and we were particularly bemoaning our failure to bring a packable fly rod as we watched cutthroat sip emerging flies off the surface of the lake. There's always something to do better next time.
All said, it was a relatively easy and straightforward hunt. Total costs were $735 for the flight, $131 for the cabin for three days, and then consumables like ammo and food. We were limited to 800 pounds of people and cargo each way and we were about 450# between us and food/gear so 4 deer or 2 deer + one bear seemed pretty reasonable for a maximum harvest. There were also more blueberries than you could possibly harvest and pretty dense concentrations of winter chantarelles and hedgehog mushrooms to supplement the deer. For the record, we did mark and report 5 tags total, including the deer lost to bears.
