With the long long winter coming to an end I was anxious to get out and do some hunting and bear hunting would be first on the list. Bears quickly emerge from their winter dens as the snow begins to melt and the days get warmer. Early May is the time to be out looking for a big black bear as their food sources are concentrated and it's easier to locate them on the steep mountainsides. Basically, you look for anything that's green and chances are there will be a bear nearby or right there, gorging on green grass or other vegetation.
I was unable to get a very early start on it, as I wasn't a resident of Alaska until May 19th. I didn't get out hunting until the 21st due to work constraints. So early on Saturday the 21st, I was headed south along the Turnagain arm towards the Kenai Peninnsula in search of a black spot on a hillside.
The bear in the picture is almost a mile away.
I went along with a friend of mine, Jerome, who I'll be going on my big sheep hunt with this fall. We searched all morning and came up empty with no sightings and decided to head home about mid-day. On the way home however, we spotted a black bear on a mountainside and pulled over to take a look. That bear was almost invisible to the naked eye, but with the binoculars he looked big! We quickly devised a plan and threw our packs on and grabbed our rifles and headed up, way up!
In the last paragraph I used the word rifle, that's not a typo. As most already know, I've been a life-long bow hunter and never really picked up a rifle to hunt with. Hunting with a bow in these conditions is pretty much a waste of time. Under better conditions I would hunt with a bow but it's just too difficult to make a stalk on a bear with the amount of dead vegetation and the terrain. The bear will hear me coming far before I get there due to all the dead brush and alder thickets.
Back to the story...We begin our climb and notice the wind blowing upward towards the bear, this was a problem. We then tried to skirt around a bit but we were limited to a sheer ravine one side and a timber patch on the other that was so thick that a squirrel would have a hard time finding his way through. So we just hoped that we could skirt enough to one side that the wind would carry our scent past the bear. Well we slowly crested the ridge where the bear would be and he wasn't there. We knew that he had smelled us and halfway expected it. We hung out briefly and drank some water and took in the view. We had just climbed about 1500 vertical feet and were beat.
The rest of my trips out ended up about the same way. I saw quite a few bears but it was just too difficult to stalk something that you'd lose sight of for so long. I'll try again this fall when the bears will be out in the berry patches gorging on blueberries. It's time to get into fishing mode! Open season for the Kenai river is Saturday June 11th and the salmon are already in the river!
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