Alaska Moose Trip Report - DM920

[sdieffen]

Excellent write up! A couple of questions if you have time. Which U-haul place did you rent from in Fairbanks? Did you get a van or a box truck? I'm going for a late August 2020 Caribou hunt on the haul road and need a way to get up there that doesn't cost 150/day. Plan on taking a pack-raft to cross the Sag and then hiking in as far as needed. I keep hearing that the tussocks are bad. I just got back from 20 days of humping the Colorado mountains for elk in September, but everything I read is that the tundra will kick your butt hiking. Do you think 1 mile per hour is doable? I'm in excellent hiking shape.

I'd like to Moose hunt next year also, but I'm having a difficult time deciding where to hunt. Having never been that far north I don't know what legal access there is. I'm leaning towards Units 20 and 25 that don't have any antler point restrictions. If you read some of the other internet forums, everyone talks about doing it DIY but that involves a $6000 bush flight package. I know that most Alaskans have boats or aircraft but I'm sure some harvest moose the old fashioned way, on foot. How did you determine that the old mining roads you were hunting were not private property? I've gleaned over BLM maps but keep coming up empty, onX seems to be somewhat limited also. Any advice you can give me is much appreciated! Thank you in advance.

 

[COEngineer]

We got a 15' box truck (we reserved a 10', but they didn't have any available when we arrived, so they upgraded us to the 15'). We picked it up at the Uhaul place nearest to the airport (2 or 3 miles at most). I think our total cost for the Uhaul (including gas and mileage) was about $1k for 8 days and ~700 miles.

You can probably sustain 1 mph if you don't break your ankles - apparently the trick is to not think or look any further ahead than the next step. Thinking ahead leads to disappointment and looking ahead leads to stumbling around, wasting more energy.

We saw a fair number of trucks parked along the roads and I assume they were hunters on foot, but the successful hunters we talked to were mostly flown-in and/or floated/jet-boated a river. If/when I go again, I think a float trip where an outfitter drops me off somewhere and picks me up a few days downriver would be the way to go and not super expensive. We used a couple different apps (not OnX, although I'm sure they use the same info) that show land ownership. Almost everything along the haul road is BLM and open to the public, I can't speak for other areas.

Double check the regs, I think almost everywhere in AK is point-restricted or minimum width-restricted for non-residents, but I could be wrong.

 

[sdieffen]

Thank you for the response! There are a few units that are any bull that are in NE/Central Alaska.

 

[Justhuntitall]

I will avoid the suspense and let you know that I never found out what a moose quarter on my back feels like. We were in the wrong unit at the wrong time - that's hunting. We had several people tell us that we should have come 2 weeks later, but just as many people said there are usually bulls all over the place this time of year, and one guy in particular (from Fairbanks) said he saw the biggest moose he has ever seen at this time last year (he was there with a tag hoping to see it again this year). A local retired guide said last winter was brutal and the summer extremely hot, so a lot of bulls might have died in the snow and/or were still way up in the mountains.

Highlights:
- Lynx. I saw the mom and a couple minutes later my buddy stumbled into her two kittens and then crapped his pants when she jumped out of a tree nearby.
- Moose. We got close to a cow and calf - their bark is similar to an elk, but more guttaral and louder. We spotted a different cow a mile away across the valley and practically up in sheep country. The last night of the hunt we heard a cow call (pretty sure) and then something responded to her (maybe a young bull??), but we never saw them.
- Wolf. Saw a glimpse of one running across the road near dark.
- Bears. We saw 9 different bears, most at great distance through binocs, but one right by the road. I think most were grizzly, but I'm certainly no expert.
- Northern Lights. Saw them several nights. Very cool, but none of the super bright/colorful ones.
- Snow-capped peaks. We drove over Atigun Pass and out to the tundra (but not all the way to Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay). The snow is indescribably white on the mountain tops. These mountains did not feel like the Rockies.
- Grayling. We fished the Jim River on the way back to Fairbanks and caught singles here and there on silver spinners. Then we found a hot spot and probably caught a dozen from 12-18". We gutted and fried them skin-on in butter with a little seasoning salt and they were delicious.
- Snowshoe hares. They were just starting to turn white, which made them really stand out against the dull brown leaf litter. We shot and ate two of them just for the heck of it. They are decent sized and taste like chicken (except for the stringy legs, which taste like rubber after you chew on them for a minute, same as any other small game).

A few generalities worth sharing:
- Uhaul trucks make decent car/base camps. They are water and bear resistant, you can stand up in the back, you can put whole tents in them so you don't have to take them down each morning. They are relatively cheap and you can drive them on the Dalton Hwy (haul road). They also have railings, so if you were thinking ahead you could bring some hooks to hang all your stuff on them.
- The Dalton Hwy sounds worse than it is. Most of the road is in decent shape - you have to watch out for the pot-holes, but more importantly, the hard-to-see frost heaves that can and do send under-loaded Uhauls airborne. We only saw one car (yes, someone drove a regular old car up there) broken down along the ~800 miles we drove.
- Some of the locals are very friendly if you demonstrate a willingness to do more than road hunt. Some of the locals don't appreciate their own hypocrisy in making a living off of the tourists/hunters who visit but also feel like you are trying to kill "their" moose, even though they apparently (I can't figure out the subsistence rules) can drive anywhere they want and hunt with a rifle while we were restricted to driving no more than 1/4 mile from the highway and can only use archery equipment. I guess the fact that it's all BLM land doesn't factor into it for them either.
- Hiking/walking in open areas that isn't an old or current road is extremely difficult. I live in CO and hike in the mountains all the time. This is completely different. It's not that's it's steep (which it is in some places), or high (the mountains near us were only 5-6,000') but that the ground is so uneven. The tussocks, as the local former guide called them, make hiking a nightmare.
- A lot of areas look just like the Rocky Mountains. Many times I thought, "If I took a picture from here, no one would know that I wasn't in CO." View attachment 114776
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Hi
I got lucky and drew this same Tag. Was wondering if I could email you and ask you a few question?
Thanks
Shane V.

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