It’s been awhile since my last post about my 2019 Alaska moose hunt. Time to sit down and get another one done.

As it turns out, in reviewing my journal entries of the hunt, I discovered that my memory was a bit rusty when I made the last post. I completely passed right over nearly a whole week! So, this post will cover that missed time and get the chronology straightened out.

So, when we left off, Derek and I had arrived at camp, got ourselves and horses squared away, our other hunting buddies had flown in and we had hauled them up into the foothills to start their Dall sheep hunt. That’s where I got things mixed up. That was Wednesday, September 11, 2019.

You will recall that Apollo had a bruised hoof and was pretty sore, so I let him rest a few days.

On Thursday, Derek and I took a very long and tough ride across the foothills and valley to the west of camp, looking for new routes to take us to farther ranges and hunting areas. The area Derek has hunted for several years didn’t show any promise for decent moose bulls last year (2018), due to the presence of a pack of more than 24 timber wolves.

I saddled up Moose for this ride. She is a Missouri Fox Trotter mare, about 15-2 hands tall, with a strong build. She is about 9 years old. Moose plows through the tundra like a bulldozer. She can carry a 300 pound pack all day and drag the other pack horses along behind. If she has one shortcoming at all, it is that as a pack horse she doesn’t like to track behind the lead horse.

She has had her heels clipped a time or two by the horse behind, which is quite painful, so she likes to walk to the side of the string and ends up trying to get alongside of the lead saddle horse.  She sometimes gets on the wrong side of trees and causes problems. On our trip in to the hunt camp, Moose was the cause of our most serious wreck, because she doesn’t like to stay in line. Still, as a saddle horse on any kind of trail, she is hard to beat, utterly fearless and strong. This was her third trip to Alaska and she knew the drill.

Derek was riding Finn again, his tall, lanky, strong, Tennessee Walker. This was his second trip to Alaska and he was a different horse this time. Last year Finn didn’t have the strength necessary to carry Derek through the Alaskan terrain. He tired quickly, stumbled a lot and didn’t hold his weight well. This year it was a different story. Finn was up to the task and proved himself a very good horse for this difficult job. He was amazing.

We decided to find a reliable way to cross a large valley to the west of our hunt camp, that would give us a faster route to Cottonwood Creek and beyond. The way across the flat in the bottom was tough on the horses. The stunted Alberta pines grow so close together in places a horse can barely fit between them, much less a horse with a pack. Then there are the marshes and tundra that the horses had to struggle through. In the long run, we were able to find and mark a pretty good route. We will still need to clear paths through a couple Alder thickets in the future, but it’s a much quicker travel route and easier on the horses than making our way across the foothills.

After we reached Cottonwood Creek, which is mostly a dry gravel and shale wash, we headed south toward the area we wanted to take a look at. About a mile down the wash, we came upon the camp of the local outfitter. They use the wash as a runway to fly their hunters in by bush plane. We happened upon one of their guides and a pilot there. They were none too happy with us and leveled some veiled threats at us for invading their hunt area. We ignored those and just went about our business. It was sufficient for Derek that they knew we could reach their camp with little effort, should anything untoward happen at our camp.

By the time we started back toward home camp, it was getting on toward evening. We returned by way of the foothills, which we both knew very well.  Moose and Finn knew they were heading back toward camp, so they put it into high gear and we made our way over the hills at a pretty quick clip in the gait these horses are known for.  We found ourselves busting down the tundra covered hills as fast as 10 miles per hour!

We arrived back at camp just after full dark. We were lucky the horses knew the way, because we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces! We logged 19 miles that day. By the time we arrived back at camp,   both our horses and ourselves were absolutely tuckered-out.

Made for a sound night’s sleep.

The only game we saw through all our travels that day were several Dall sheep way up in the peaks and a lone boar Black bear. That was quite disappointing, even though we didn’t consider it a hunting day.  I commented in my journal that the way the Dall sheep can hang on sheer cliff faces amazes me. That is really something to see. I wished our two buddies hunting them lots of luck!

The next two days were rainy, so we stayed in camp and lazed around and relaxed. It was a good rest period for the horses as well. We had  brought some good old Louis L’Amour western novels and we went through a couple each. Late in the day on Saturday we heard wolves howling on both sides of camp, but some distance away. We never saw any, though.

The weather was still fairly warm, so the bugs were horrible. The horses, despite our keeping fly wipe and spray on them, were covered with welts from gnat and mosquito bites. We hoped and prayed for frost to kill off the insects. That came only a few days later, to the great relief of all. Meanwhile, we kept a smoking fire going, which helped greatly.

After our experience a few days earlier, in which four of our horses headed back toward the trailhead on their own, we kept a sharp eye on the horses as we allowed them to graze. We found it was pretty safe to allow two at a time out of the corral. We rotated them every several hours, so that all 6 had at least two hours of grazing time. We also supplemented their grazing with alfalfa pellets we hauled in with us, but, being restricted by the weight we could haul in on the horses, we realized the bagged feed wasn’t going to last long. The plan was for me head out with three pack horses and bring several hundred pounds of feed back in from the trailer. That took place a few days later and is documented in the previous post.

On Sunday, we took another ride over west, through the valley and the flats again. We decided to make this a hunt day as well as an exploration day, so we took two pack horses along, with gear to sustain us in case we got a moose and had to make camp for the night.  This time we crossed through the flats in the valley and made a loop over to Anaconda Creek, named for its winding path, then farther west to Cottonwood Creek, then on over another ridge to Carden Creek. The travel was tough, but the horses handled it in stride.

On this day I rode Ginger, a Missouri Fox Trotter mare about 15.2 hands, almost a duplicate of Moose. She had made this same hunt trip at least four times before. She is an amazing horse, one I would trust with my life under any circumstances. Ginger has a Fox Trot that is amazing. She plows through anything without hesitation, never stumbles, and hops up into her fox trot at every possible place in the trail...if there is a trail at all! She really doesn’t need one.

After crossing Anaconda Creek and climbing to the crest of a ridge between Anaconda and Cottonwood Creek, we stopped for lunch and spent some time scoping the valley below. We spotted two bull moose that were legal size (50 inch spread minimum or four tines on one brow), but they were too far away and moving too fast to even consider trying for them.

We made our way farther west, crossing Cottonwood to Carden Creek, which was the farthest west Derek had been on his previous hunts. We saw no further moose the rest of the day.

By the time we turned back toward camp, once again taking the high route through the foothills because we were familiar with the route, the daylight was fading. While the evening sunshine on the mountain peaks was beautiful, we didn’t take much time to look. We were pushing hard to make it back to camp. We were concerned about finding the trail in the dark.

We were still about three-and-a-half miles from camp when we heard a dog yelp. We looked around and couldn’t find Lucky and Ruger anywhere! We stopped and called, searching in the fading light, but couldn’t find them. Then, a few minutes later, both dogs slowly made their way up to the horses.  What we saw was one of the worst sights I have ever seen on any of my pack trips or hunts.

The dogs had apparently come upon a porcupine and had torn into it. Ruger, the pup, was the luckier of the two. He had a dozen or so quills stuck in the side of his face. Lucky, on the other hand (despite his name) had literally hundreds of quills in his face, inside his mouth, and even on his sides.  There were quills sticking through his ears and through his tongue! He had so many stuck inside his mouth that he could not close it! My heart sank.

Derek and I parked the horses, tied them to a couple stunted pines, and went to work on the dogs with our multi-tools. I went to Ruger first, while Derek started on Lucky. Ruger sat there submissively, while I plucked the few quills out of the side of his face. He winced a bit and gave a muffled cry a time or two, but within a couple minutes I had removed all the quills I could find and he was feeling much better.

Then I turned to help Derek with poor Lucky. He was in such pain that it was difficult to hold him down. We turned him on his back and one of us would sit on him and hold his face still while the other pulled quills. At first Lucky was tough and just whimpered a little, but after the first fifty or so quills were pulled, he started snapping at us and yelping out loud. It must have been terrible for him, yet he never bit down on us, despite getting our hands in his mouth several times.

While all this was going on, Derek and I kept in the back of our minds the thought that we were out in the middle of nowhere, in Grizzly bear country, with wolves all around, in the dark, with a yelping dog! Luckily, we were not disturbed!

Eventually Lucky just couldn’t take any more, so we let him alone. At least he could close his mouth now. We got back in the saddle and made the last few miles to camp with two wounded dogs and tired horses, through bear and wolf country, in the dark. The horses, always reliable, knew the way and took us home at a good Fox Trot. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Ginger, for bringing us safely to camp that night, hours after dark. She comes into play again, pulling my weight through a tough day later in the trip as well.

We made 23 very tough miles that day. We were pretty happy to find our camp undisturbed, with the other horses calling to us and ready for some feed.

Another good night’s sleep.

The next day I left with three pack horses to make the 20 miles back to the trailhead to bring horse feed back to camp.

P.S.

Just so nobody worries too much, both Ruger and Lucky survived the trip. Lucky’s face swelled and we were pulling quills out of him for days. After we arrived back home at Spanish Fork, Utah, Derek took him in to see the vet, who sedated Lucky and pulled another 20 or so quills out of his mouth and face. He is fully recovered now, a much wiser pup than before.

TH