Helicopter Capture Compilation

[Frequently Banned Troll]

It is also definitely not for everyone.

 

[Stifler]

I had a lot of previous experience with helicopters while working in the wildfire biz. After that I ended up working for the state department primarily doing survey work along the western US/Canada border. In Alaska and a lot of the mountainous parts of the NW, getting to survey sites along the border would be impractical/impossible without a helicopter. We contracted work with quite a few different helicopter companies, but in Alaska we always used the company that I ended up working for doing the wildlife capture work. Other than a couple of Canadian pilots we had worked with, those capture pilots were on a whole different level. I got to be friends with one of those pilots. He really had no choice in the matter since we were mostly working out of tent or remote work shack camps and were stuck with each other for months on end. He showed me some of his capture videos and I talked him into talking the owner of the company into giving me a shot.

I don't think you will ever see a job posting for a mugger or gunner position. Its a pretty tough nut to crack and you pretty much have to be recommended by someone in the industry. It is also definitely not for everyone. Over the years that I was part of it, I got to work with quite a few guys that thought they were pretty tough. Not many of them made it a week. Not to say I'm particularly tough...more of a combination of hard headedness and a lack of self preservation.

I just don't have the brains to care about my joints that much, lifes only lived once. Id rather have a exciting one. And your on top of that. I'd be in it for the adrenalin largly.. You have definitely rewarded the work of conservation by being hard headed, and your lack of self preservation. Thank you.

this is by far one of the coolest videos I have ever seen, and just gives a blip of the experiences you had. Just made me realize how lame my career choice was.

 

[recon6036]

Hi, my name is Theat, and I have balls of Steel

 

[Mtnhunter1]

Seems like those sheep have had some experience with helicopters. Very Cool!

 

[Derek44]

A couple more short clips with some bighorn sheep. The second one has a bit of uninteresting flying around before the good part starts at about 45 sec in.

Holy %*#?€

That had to be close rotor clearance against that bluff. That was incredible

 

[mtmuley]

Thanks so much theat. Incredible. Will be watching this as long as you take it. mtmuley

 

[isu22andy]

Talk about some next level scouting ha ! Want to trade Onyx pins ? Lol

 

[Frequently Banned Troll]

@theat my better half picked this up last week in eastern MT while looking for antlers. Is this from an Ariel dart?

 

[Redman2216]

I was deleting a bunch of old photos and video off my phone yesterday and realized that I had a bunch of cool video clips I filmed with my phone at my previous job. A lot of the time I had a GoPro attached to my helmet, but there were also a lot of days I just didn't want to deal with it. These clips are from when my coworkers or myself felt it worth the risk of taking a glove off and pulling our phone out of a zippered pocket. Sticking an exposed hand out of a moving helicopter in the winter is pretty cold and you would be surprised how hard it is to hold on to it in the slipstream. As you will see, I was playing around with the slow-mo function on my iPhone quite a bit. Has a little of just about every type of western big game other than antelope. Quite a bit of it was filmed vertically and I converted it to horizontal, so its worth watching on a computer or tv rather than a phone.

Badass my man!

 

[EastTNHunter]

I dug up and started going through some of my GoPro videos last night looking for the video of some of the more exciting bull elk catches. I have multiple hundreds of hours of video so no luck yet on those, but I did find this clip from catching mountain goats in the East Humbolts in Nevada. Its 6 unedited minutes with 3 goats getting caught. Be warned that the helicopter noise is pretty loud at the beginning.

Don’t know how I missed this one in March, but I’m getting cold just watching that. The downdraft from that helicopter in that cold had to be brutal