Ep. 820: Breaking Down My Alaskan Deer Hunt

This week on the show I detail the incredible experience and lessons learned from my 2024 Alaskan deer hunt. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to
the Whitetail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile
hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light
Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on
the show, I'm breaking down my first deer hunt of
the twenty twenty four season, and it was an Alaskan
deer hunt. All right, Welcome back to the Wired to

(00:52):
Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light and their
Camo for Conservation Initiative and the brand new Whitetail line
that came out this year. I hope you've heard all
about it. I won't belabor the point, but you can
check it out over at first light dot com. And
today it's storytime. It's just you and me. I'm telling

(01:13):
you a story. It's one of the most unique stories
that I've been able to ever share here on the
Wired Hunt podcast. And it is a deer hunt, which
you've heard about plenty before. But this is a very
different kind of deer hunt because this is a deer
hunt that took place not in Michigan, not in Iowa
or Ohio, or Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Texas, Nope, I went way

(01:37):
up north to Alaska. So today I want to tell
you about why I went to Alaska, how I went
to Alaska, what I was chasing, how I was chasing it,
and how that hunt went down, and a few things
about that location and the species up there that I
think are worth knowing. So that's the game plan today.

(02:00):
The heck of an adventure up there, was up in
Alaska for almost two weeks. Just got back the other day,
and so so yeah, I want to share that story
with you and what I learned along the way, hopefully
maybe inspire a few of you to explore this part
of the country someday, maybe arm you with a little
bit of insight that can help you plan and execute
a trip like that and entertaining the rest of you

(02:22):
if nothing else. So that's the game plan for today's show.
A couple of house cleaning items before we do that.
The Whitetail Edu series, our educational whitetail series that Tony
and I have been doing on YouTube. That's wrapped up,
so the first season of white Tail Edu is done.
There are ten episodes now over on the meet either

(02:42):
Clips YouTube channel. So you can watch all ten now
the most recent episodes of covered topics such as choosing
euromounts or shoulder mounts, what's the right mount for you?
Shot placement on deer. We did a deep dive on that.
We did a video on callington sure bucks a few
weeks earlier, we did one about how mature bucks uniquely travel.

(03:06):
So if you want to get some last minute deer
hunting know how into your brain before the season kicks off,
or maybe you're already hunting and you're just wanting some
some refreshers before the next hunt, check those out. That's
really the only thing other than I I guess this
is just a general thing, but the rest of my
hunting season is going to be kicking off here pretty
soon across Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, maybe some other spots. And

(03:30):
if you want to follow along with what I've got
going on personally, if you want to be able to
see videos and photos and more frequent updates on these adventures, uh,
make sure you're following me on Instagram. That's where I
share everything, that's my most active platform. So that the
handle is wired to hunt all words at you know

(03:50):
at wired to Hunt so head on over there if
you haven't already, if you're not signed up for our
white or sorry, are Wired to Hunt weekly newsletter. That's
another big one. If you go to themedia dot Com
website and go to the newsletter button where you can
sign up for the newsletters, there's a Wired to Hunt
newsletter option, and that gets you an email every Monday

(04:12):
with a note for me, sometimes with updates on my
hunts or a quick tip or an interesting idea I
ran across, and then links to all of our most
recent whitetail articles, podcasts, and videos put out across Media
and Wired Hunt. So lots and lots of stuff coming out.
You know that We've got a whole stable of different
writers who are sharing whitetail how to articles. You know.

(04:35):
On the podcast side, of course you've got this show,
but then of course Tony's Foundations podcast, the ret Fresh
Radio podcast that come out every Wednesday with updates from
all over the country on what deer doing right now.
Like all that stuff, you can stay up to date
with that newsletter, so highly recommend you do that too.
That's it, I guess as far as those quick little reminders.

(04:57):
Let's talk deer let's talk Alaska, talked this hunt. I
just came back from why did I want to go
to Alaska and why did I want to go to
hunt deer there. That's a good question, and it's where
we should start, and some of it I can explain

(05:19):
to you. Some of it I'm going to hold back
because part of what inspired me to go up to
Alaska for a deer hunt was a very interesting wildlife
ecology phenomena underway right now. There's some interesting stuff going
on in Alaska that I was interested in, and I
wanted to do some reporting on it, some learning about it,

(05:39):
some research on it, and I want to share it
with you folks and many others. But that's still kind
of in the midst of happening right now. This trip
was part of that research process. I'm still doing some now.
I want to wait to start talking about that until
I have a very clear, comprehensive handle on this situation.
But rest assured. We did a film. We produced a

(06:03):
film up there in Alaska about this hunt and about
this interesting ecological situation, and I will be diving into
all of that, you know, in the next six months
to a year, once we finally put all that together
and bring that out to the world. So that's like
I realized, like a ridiculous teaser to tell you there's
this interesting thing and I'm not going to tell you

(06:24):
about it, but I guess forgive me, I'm doing it anyways.
So there's some interesting stuff going on with wildlife up there.
That was one thing, and then as I found out
about this interesting stuff, it got me more and more
interested in blacktail deer and what their situation is up there,
and how healthy is that population, how healthy is their habitat,

(06:44):
what's the future look like for blacktail deer, what's the
future of the landscape they live in up there? What
do they need to survive and to thrive? What's going
on up in this part of the world. And this
part of the world is southeast Alaska. So for those
who aren't familiar, and if you're watching on video, I'm
gonna see if I can do this the right way.
If you're seeing on video, this is kind of what
Alaska looks like. I'm holding out my hand, my thumb's down,

(07:06):
my index fingers out a little bit, and then the
rest of my hand is kind of three fingers together.
You've got this peninsula that sticks out to the south.
That's southeast Alaska that branches down off the main body
of Alaska down along the edge of British Columbia. And
this is where Juno is. This is where Ketchikan is.
This is where Prince of Wales Island is. This is

(07:27):
where Steve's fishshack is. This is where, you know, the
largest tempered rainforest in North America is the Tongus National Force.
Is this incredible seventeen million acre rainforest in North America.
It's it's vast, it's home to some of the largest
trees in the world, an incredible breadth of biodiversity. And this,

(07:53):
you know, huge swath of wild country too. I mean
there's there's obviously some towns like ketch can do you know,
you know others I mentioned, but it is wild too,
and so you know, I wanted to get up there
and see this. You know, I've heard Steve telling stories
about this area. My buddy is you know, Yannis and

(08:15):
Brody and all these guys have been out there, have
seen these places. If hunted deer there, have experienced the
fishing there, have experienced this landscape. And I wanted to
see that too, And so I thought man, I can
learn about what's going on with black tailed deer up there.
I can go see this place firsthand for myself and
learn a little bit more about why this place is
so important and worth protecting. Even though I'm a michigan Er,

(08:36):
I'm a guy who lives thousands and thousands of miles away.
I keep hearing about the Tongus National Forest. I keep
hearing about why some people call this the salmon forest
or the climate forest, because this forest has an unbelievable
set of dependencies I guess on The forest sucks up
a tremendous amount of carbon, so it's helping with that

(08:57):
whole situation. It provides much of the habitat that vast
swaths of the salmon in the world depend on. The
forest itself is actually built in part by salmon because
salmon run up all these thousands of streams across Southeast Alaska,
and as many of you probably know, salmon when they spawn,

(09:19):
so when they lay their eggs, they then die. So
salmon lay their eggs in these streams, deep into these
islands or deep inside the interior of Southeast Alaska. Little
baby salmon are hatched. They eventually get larger and then
swim out of the rivers and streams into the ocean.
They spend some number of years in the ocean. They

(09:39):
grow and grow and grow and collect all these ocean
nutrients in their bodies. They then when they are going
to spawn at the end of their life, they swim
back up those streams to the very exact same place
they were born, They lay their eggs, and then they
die there, effectively bringing all of those ocean nutrients back
into the interior into these four forests, where then they

(10:01):
provide the best fertilizer in the world and essentially are
the nutrient source for these massive trees and forests. So
it's a very very interesting cycle that's going on there.
So that's a long winded way of saying, there's some
really cool shit in southeast Alaska that I wanted to
learn about and that I wanted to see. So that's

(10:23):
what kicked all this off. I became fascinated with this
idea of learning about this deer species that lives there,
Sikka black tail deer. They are a you know, one
of the three ish main species of deer in North America.
We've got white tailed deer of course, Then you've got
mule deer, and then there's like a couple versions of
black tail that you've got Colombian black tail deer, which

(10:44):
are like a subspecies ish of mule deer. I don't
even know enough about how they differentiate. I remember hearing
at one point that there's basically just like a highway
and they say, one side of the highways a mule deer,
one side of the highways a black tail deer. But
then if you go north, north north, you get to
a very different blacktail, which is the Sikka blacktail deer.
And these deer are stout and short and compact compared

(11:09):
to their cousins down south. They have smaller antlers, darker.
They live in these rainforest environments. They're native to southeast
Alaska in that region, and they're super cool, these dark
black foreheads a blacktail, as their name of course would
clue you in on. And they live in wild places.

(11:32):
Not only do they live in these rainforest environments, but
they also can live up in the alpine kind of
like you know, like the alpine mule deer habitat that
some of us are used to seeing in Colorado or
Nevada or something. Well, they're up high in these peaks
in Alaska too, and so I got to thinking, how
awesome would it be to go see this rainforest, climb

(11:52):
through it, get to the top of the mountains, and
find black tailed deer up there. So that's what I
started exploring and researching and thinking about, which led me
to reaching out to someone who has written about these
topics in the past, written about a bunch of interesting
things around Alaska and blacktail deer and bears a lot.

(12:13):
And that's a guy named Bjorn Dila. Bjorn is a
resident of southeast Alaska, there in Juno and one of
the wildest, most wilderness savvy mountain men I've ever met.
I mean, this guy is a legend as far as
I'm concerned. And we started chatting. I started asking him

(12:37):
questions about his experience his hunting blacktails in this area
and this habitat, and the guy was kind enough to say, Man,
why don't we just spend some time together. Let's go
just hunt together. I can show you around, teach you
a thing or two, and so that's what we decided
to do. So Bjorn and I were going to meet
up and we're going to do a black tailed deer
hunt together in a place called Admiral t Island, which

(13:02):
is an island just off the coast of southeast Alaska.
It's a sixteen hundred square mile island that is mostly
designated wilderness, mostly public land, a super super wild place,
and home to approximately sixteen hundred brown bears, So sixteen

(13:24):
hundred square miles sixteen hundred brown bears. Brown bears, you know,
those are grizzlies, coastal grizzlies, very very big grizzlies that
live on the coast. Subsist in a large way by
way of fish and salmon. So there's about a brown
bear per square mile on this island. There's a whole

(13:44):
pile of them. So I also had some bear questions
for Bjorn leading into the strip, and fortunately he's a
guy who has a lot of experience with that, which
gave me some peace of mind because not only is
he an outdoor writer and an experienced hunter, but he's
also been a bear viewing guy, which led to some
very interesting stories. We're like, you know, he was part

(14:04):
of a company where he would take people out to
go experience brown bears relatively close. And then he's also
a guy who natural history documentarians. So the people who
make shows like you know, like Planet Earth or One Planet,
or you know, all the Netflix, BBC National Geographic animal
documentary films and shows, they hire Bjorn to be the

(14:26):
guy who goes sets up all the logistics and who
guides them safely to film bears and that kind of stuff.
So the guy knows how to handle himself in big
bear country and made it so I felt, you know,
comfortable exploring a new place in a density of bears
that I'm not used to. I've spent a lot of
time in grizzly country down the lower forty eight, but
this was just like another level. So so Bjorn was

(14:47):
great to make sure I was on the right program,
and then just the stories he has, I'm gonna I
couldn't get him on the show this week, but he
is going to come on the show sometime this fall
or this winter, and we're going to talk about some
of the stuf more detail with him, because he's fascinating.
He is, lack of a better term, just legit, Like
he is one of the most legit wilderness I don't

(15:12):
know how to subscribe wilderness savvy. The dude has done
some wild stuff and I want you guys to hear
about it at some point. He's also a phenomenal writer.
I'm gonna plug one of his books right here while
we're talking. The beginning this book, A Shape in the Dark,
Living and Dying with Brown Bears. I don't care if
you never plan on going to Alaska, if you have
any interest in grizzly bears and brown bears, if they

(15:34):
fascinate you or they terrify you, or you just think
they're really cool, or you want to hunt him someday,
or you just want to see him. I just want
to learn about him. This is an excellent book about
brown bears and the history of brown bears in America
and his many, many crazy stories with them. It's just
really well done. So go buy that book right now.

(15:55):
Highly recommend it, A Shape in the Dark. Okay, So
Jorden's the guy who I spent time with. That's why
I spent time with him. Admiralty Island is the place
that I went to at the beginning of the trip.
I went and spent some time with a biologist with
Alaska fishing game talking about this ecological phenomena that I'll

(16:16):
be sharing with you guys. At a later date I
went and hiked and checked out a massive glacier from
the Juno ice field to see some stuff going on
with that glacier, which was really interesting and eye opening
to see that was cool. But all that was kind
of the preamble to the actual hunt. The plan for
the hunt was that we were going to fly in

(16:37):
a beaver I think it was super beaver. This one
was called from Juno to Admiralty Island and get dropped
off at a lake there, and then from there we
would load up our backpacks and spike out make a
spike camp up in the alpine on top of a mountain.
The problem was that the day we're supposed to fly
out it was rainy, foggy, cloudy and nasty mess and

(16:58):
it pushed back our flight. So we went to a diner.
Pushed back another hour, so we had a second cup
of coffee. Pushed back another hour, so we ate lunch.
Pushed back another two hours. So we went to Bjorn's
house and hung out for a while and worked, and
long story short, they eventually at like four four thirty
something like that, they called and just said, hey, we're
not going to fly today. We're gonna try again tomorrow.
So that was a bummer. But my camera operator Colin,

(17:22):
and I went and went fishing, went for a hike,
so it was cool. Made the best of our off day.
Saw some beautiful stuff. So hundreds and hundreds of hundreds
of eagles, all these bald eagles congregating around this river
where all these salmon were coming in. If you've never
been to the Pacific Northwest, especially to Alaska or British

(17:44):
Columbia where we still have salmon runs, just this incredible
flow of life in and out of these river systems
is just unbelievable. You have to see it and experience it.
The the fecundity of it. I guess, it's just so alive,
there's so much going on. You're like seeing the world,

(18:07):
like mother Nature, playing out right in front of you
in a very tangible way. It was just very very powerful,
I guess to see that that's neither here nor there,
not related to the deer, but that's something I kept
seeing over and over again. That just kind of took
my breathway. Anyways, the flight got delayed twenty four hours,

(18:28):
but luckily the next day, even though it's pouring rain,
they said Hey, we can do it. We're gonna give
a shot. So we kind of race to the plane.
It's a float plane. We load everything up in the rain,
hop in the plane. I'm in the front seat, takes off.
I'll be honest, I was a little bit sketched out
because it was still pretty darn cloudy and windy and rainy.

(18:48):
I'm thinking, how's this guy gonna get us there? Because
these planes, these guys fly by sight mostly maybe entirely
with these guys, and we were at times like to
flying blind and then you'd come in and out of
clouds and he's weaving his way across like gaps in
the mountains and overwater bodies where there's a little bit
more visibility. But it was also really cool, beautiful, and

(19:11):
we did make it to the lake. Dropped us down
at the lake and there was a four service cabin
there that we'd rented as like a as like a
backup base of operations. If we couldn't be in the
alpine or if we needed to have someone to keep
stuff dry, we'd have this little one room cabin. So
we had that and we got dropped off, but the
weather got worse and it got socked in and based
on the forecast it looked like the rest of the

(19:31):
day it was going to be like that. So we
decided to kind of unload, reorganize, chill at the cabin.
That first day do some fishing. There was a lake
like I mentioned, and then a really cool creek coming
out of it, so we fished and caught a pile
a coastal cutthroat trout, which was a lot of fun.
And then the next morning the weather was supposed to
clear and we would be able to hike up the mountain,

(19:54):
up into the alpine and actually start the deer hunt.
So we did that. The next they got up, loaded
everything in the backpacks for like three or four days
up there in the mountains. Had to take a boat.
We had like a little John boat in a pack
craft that we had to take across the lake to
the side where this mountain was that We're gonna hunt. Unloaded,
and then started hiking. And you know, the crazy thing

(20:19):
about this place is the terrain and the actual vegetation
is just so different than anything that I'm used to
deer hunting. Of course, the vegetation is the biggest thing.
Like I mentioned, this is a rainforest, This is an
absolute jungle. And so you'll go through some stretches where
it's just open timber, like big old growth timber, and
that's beautiful and not so bad to get through, except

(20:42):
for the fact that there's dead trees everywhere, and so
you're constantly going over dead falls and you're constantly falling
into holes. Because if you can imagine like a thousand
year old forest with all these dead trees falling down
and slowly rotting away from all the moisture, you get
just like a spongy floor of and you'll fall through
that floor sometimes because it's rotten wood. So sometimes there

(21:05):
would just be like a little bit of moss covering
a hole or a thin veneer of rotten wood, and
then as soon as you step on it with a
heavy backpack on, you fall through. So you'd be hiking
and walking and then all of a sudden, it's like
you're post hauling in deep snow, but you're just falling.
So that was interesting. And then you'd get to other
spots where you didn't have the old trees, you had

(21:26):
like younger growth spots where sunlight came in. Then you
had like the low underbrush, just absolute nightmare. Jungle kind
of situation that you're bushwhacking through it. There's no trials here,
so we're just bushwhacking finding our way through this stuff.
And the worst stuff was something called Devil's Club, which
is like a I don't I gotta, I gotta go
look and find like something I can compare it to.

(21:48):
But it's like a long, tall, stocky plant with a
big leaf at the end and then just spines all
the way up and down it, and there's some kind
of toxin in it because it causes you to blister
different than like the regular thorns and stuff we have
in the Midwest. These thorns would create these nasty, big
red and then eventually white pussy blisters everywhere you got poked.

(22:11):
And I got them all over my hands, and if
you're watching the video, you can still see, like, I've
got these blood blisters all over my hands that are
just kind of the remnants of them. There's one right there,
but it was like white pussy blisters all over my
hand and parts of my shoulders and back and stuff.
So just made it, you know, an adventure. And then

(22:32):
you'd get to spots where it would just be so
steep that you were basically, you know, using your hands
to climb up the mountain side. It wasn't even like walkable.
You were just like hands and feet and knees and everything,
pulling your way up with a you know, fifty to
sixty pound pack with your rifle, with all this stuff.
So it was an adventure getting up there. It was
obviously all wet still and muddy, so you're slipping and

(22:54):
sliding to and this was an easy approach according to Bjorn,
So you know, what I thought was kind of a
death march. He's like, oh, this isn't that bad. So
these guys, these guys are used to some tough stuff,
and I definitely admire them for that. I thought I
was pretty mountain you know, experienced in mountain savvy, and
you know, I did fine. But it definitely was you know,

(23:16):
it worked me, I guess, is what I'm saying. So
we did that for how many hours and then punched
out finally into the alpine a tree line, and then
you're going up big like rock faces and shale slides
and avalanche shoots and different stuff. So now we're like
up in the mountains and we come finally up this
steep cliffy side and get over top, and we'd get

(23:36):
into this finally alpine plateau and right away, stay deer.
There's like two little does and a spike buck and
my first black tail deer of the trip. So really
cool to finally see them, this beautiful deer. And I
don't think they saw us, or if they did, they
just weren't too terribly concerned. And that was one thing
we found was that, you know, this is one of

(23:58):
those kinds of places and one of those kinds of
honey that you know, because of how hard it is
to get there, they just don't see many people. So
I do think that the deer were a little bit
forgiving of our presence, definitely forgiving of our of our
presence compared to like whitetail deer down here where if
you know, if they see you walking across an opening,
like they're gone. These deer, like if they saw a

(24:19):
walk across an opening, some of them, at least the
doughs would just stare at you for a while and
think like, what's that about. So that was an interesting
difference there, just you know, a totally different set of
you know, just just they've learned different things over the years,
right they have not been exposed to humans over and

(24:39):
over and had negative interactions with them. So we get
up there, these deer eventually move away. We go find
a place it's got water and kind of hidden from
the rest of the cliffs and mountain side that we
can get hidden away and set up tents, set up
our camp, and then after that we kind of regroup,
talk about strategy, and headed out for the first hunt.

(25:01):
The name of the game for this kind of hunt
was that we would get high. It kind of approached
like a like a mule or hunt, I think, in
that we would get up high in glass and check
different bulls like we would actually were going to the
very summit of this mountain, and there's all these different
like hanging valleys, like these different glacial cirques, I guess,
these bowls coming off of the different three or four

(25:23):
different sides of the mountain. And then you can get
to the summit and then walk one direction, peer down
to that bowl for a while, and then walk another
fifty yards to one hundred yards to the other side
and peer down there, and walk fifty yards another direction
and peer down that side. And so you could see
all these different little valleys that were still all above
tree line, and there was different groups of deer in
every one of those. So the first one we went to,

(25:44):
we saw what was in there. We saw I spotted
a bed of buck and a couple of beded does
and a few other dos up and feeding, and that
was exciting just to kind of see some deer doing
deer things. In that first buck, you know, looked like
a decent one, you know. I spent some time talking
to Bjorn about what I should expect as far as

(26:07):
the deer heard up there, you know, as far as
like what's the deer you should take. And Bjorn was
very much like, if you see antlers, shoot because you're
not guaranteed anything up in these places. And he traditionally
has been you know, hunting up here just you know,
just for meat and getting as much meat as he
can get, and you know, not much for passing up

(26:29):
bucks and waiting to see what else was out there.
So he was very much all about, like, man, take
a crack if you can get one, which I respect him,
was not opposed to. At the same time, though, like
this is my first time seeing blacktail deer, this is
my first time in this place. I didn't really want
to just like rush to get over with. I wanted
to kind of savor it a little bit and see
some of these critters and learn about some of these

(26:49):
critters before I, you know, hunted and killed one. So
that first valley we explored and glassed. You know, we said,
all right, that's cool, let's let's keep looking, let's keep exploring.
So then we hiked up this other big ridge line
heading to the summit and peeled over and looked on
this other side and on this other side the orange

(27:09):
spotted dough. And then I started glassing. And as I'm glassing,
I finally spot antlers. Here's a buck, a beded buck,
and it looks like a pretty nice one. It looks
like a pretty nice one to me, but I don't

(27:30):
really know what a nice one is. I mean, I
think it's a nice one, but yeah, I don't have
that context. So I'm like Bjorn, what do you think
about this deer? And he's like, oh man, that's a
that's a really good buck. That's top shelf. And you
got to you gotta know, like siic of black tailed
deer much smaller antlers than mule deer or white tailed
deer or even black tailed deer down on the west coast,

(27:53):
these are smaller antler deer. And then even as far
as Sika black tail deer's deer go, the ones on
this island are small, antlerd than the ones on somewhere
like Kodiak Island. So yeah, we're just not dealing with
big racks here. But they're like stout body, super cool deer. Still.
So what I was looking for, and what I eventually
explained to Bjorn was, you know, I'm looking for a
good representative of the species. So Biorn's like, gay, man,

(28:16):
that's a good one. But let me just peek over
this last little bowl and see what else is there.
So I sit there with the digits scope. I start
filming this buck. He's I think in Michigan we would
call him an eight pointer or a nine pointer. These
guys were calling him like a three by three because
they subtract the brow times and make it all confusing.
But it was, it was, It was a cool buck.

(28:37):
Biorn comes back eventually, after I watched this deer for
a while, he says, man, there's like four or five
bucks on the other side within two hundred and fifty
yards so maybe you should go take one of those.
I'm like, well what about this one. He's like, well, yeah,
they're probably smaller than that one. I said, well, I'm
kind of falling in love with this dear. I've been
watching him and like really cool, wide, big brow times

(29:00):
obviously a big body. So we kind of think about
it a little bit and then decide, hey, you know what,
they're separate, like they're in different bowls. I could stalk
and try to hunt this deer, and if I blow it,
I could always go back to the summit and go
to this other group and hopefully they would still be there.
So that's what we end up deciding to do. To
get around on this deer, we had to drop down

(29:22):
off the summit and do a big, wide stalk, like
a big loop to get down wind and behind him,
and then to try to be able to creep in
and get an angle and come over the crest of
the mountain to be able to see him because he
was bedded down next to a patch of pine trees,
and so I kind of, you know, looked at stuff
as best I could, took some pictures to try to identify,

(29:42):
like to have like reference points visually so I could remember, Okay,
that's what this bush looks like, that's where he was.
I used ONYX to try to look at the aerial
view and try to match up the aerial view with
what I thought I was seeing in front of me,
and then I tried to mark where I thought he
was on the map. So I tried to have all
these different reference points so that when I re you know,

(30:04):
when I circled around and relocated, I hope I could
find him again. So we get over there after that
big hike around to get there, and as I'm creeping
into where I think I should be able to see him,
I spot other deer. And what ended up happening was
that there was a whole bunch of deer in between
me and him that I never saw earlier. I think
there was I don't know, five dos, two or three

(30:27):
little forks, a bigger like six point buck, a bunch
of deer in there, and basically one of them had
me kind of pegged, and the others, you know, I
was worried that they're going to see me if I
moved any more. And I could never get an angle
to see this big buck. So for a while it's
laid on my belly until it's seen that those deer
will calm again. And then I realized, all right, I

(30:49):
gotta reposition do something different here to try to you know,
get closer or get an angle on the big buck
without those deer seeing me. So the new plan was
to belly crawl backwards out of sight and then do
another loop back behind this set of pine trees and
then try to come in like right above where that
big one was. So we try to do that and

(31:13):
make the move, me and Bjorn, and then we're followed
by Colin, who is our camera operator, who is also
awesome guy. He's produced some really good films. This isn't
a side again, I'm going off another one of my tangents,
but I want to plug him because he's produced some
great work. He just had a tremendous film called House

(31:34):
of School of Fish that is exploring the salmon situation
up in Bristol Bay. Would highly recommend checking that one
out if you want to learn more about the Tongus
National Forest. He had a great film called The Understory.
I'd recommend that one. Those are two pieces of work
that would definitely suggest you check out from Colin so
great dude, great camera operator, cinematographer, photographer, whatever you want

(31:58):
to call him. So he's with this too. So we
do this second loop, get into these trees, trying to
edge our way out to try to see something, and
again I get into a spot where I can't get
around them enough to see down to him without this
other group of deer seeing So I've kind of stuck there,
edging forward a little bit every time that these other
deer look away. But it just it wasn't a good situation,

(32:21):
and I just kept thinking to myself, like I want
to push forward to see this buck, but I just
don't see how I'm possibly gonna be able to pull
that off without him seeing us or without them seeing us.
And then as I'm kind of debating that in my
head and thinking like, is there any third option, I
hear b you hear kind of like leaping away, and

(32:41):
I look over a Bjorn he like points down beneath
us and like mouths that, like there's a deer running
with So in that moment, I was hopeful that that
wasn't the end of our hunt and the end of
our stock. But what I found later over the course
like the next hours I continue to try to slowly
squeeze or slip my way up. There was that I
had ended up stalking him because of having to take

(33:02):
this second like two different loops to try to get
different angles, and ended up getting much closer to his
bed location than I realized. And I think what ended
up happening is that we end up getting within like
seventy yards maybe of where he was betted. And I
think that our wind dropped or swirled enough that it
spooked him because we hear this deer run off, one solitary,

(33:23):
big sounding deer, and then all the other deer look
over in that direction, and then they just stayed latched
on that area for like half an hour, and they
didn't spook off, but they just kept staring over there.
And then finally after thirty minutes or whatever it was,
they finally started like moving off. There's like one bigger
buck in that group, which maybe I mean, he had

(33:44):
a much bigger buye than the other year, so he
might have been mature compared to the others. I was
still like trying to figure that out. He moved off,
and then the two or three other little four kis
moved off, and then the dos slowly over the course,
like ten fifteen minutes, all kind of followed him away,
and then I got up and moved and tried to
look where it was, but there was no deal there,
so blew that first stalk, which was disappointing, but at

(34:08):
the same time, it was really cool to see a
bunch of deer. It was fun to have my first
attempt at one of these deer, and it was you know,
especially nice to know that there was a backup option,
there was a fallback plan. So we regrouped, talked about
what happened, and then you know, decided, hey, let's try
to go back to the sum of the mountain, hike

(34:29):
back up there and get over to that other bowl
and see if those other bucks are there. So that's
what we start doing. But up to this point, I
should point out, you know, it was cloudy and rainy
all the day prior, and then as we were hiking
up the mountain in the morning, it started to clear up.
So everything was still muddy and wet, but at least
it wasn't pouring rain anymore. And then by the time
we got out to the alpine, it had cleared up

(34:51):
enough that we were starting to see the mountains around us,
and we could see sunshine and ended up getting really nice.
So it was very pretty and open and visible for
that first and for you know, when we first went
to the summit. But now we're hiking back to the
summit and now clouds rolling and it's like you're completely
socked in, like you're in a cloud. So my worry

(35:12):
as I was hiking up there was did I just
blow my only opportunity to be able sea deer? Even?
Like are we going to be stuck in this stuff
for the rest of the day and the rest of tomorrow,
you know, because we missed a day of the hunt
because of the flight. You know, our hunt time was
now significantly shortened because not only did we get our
our day a flying was pushed back twenty four hours,

(35:33):
but then when we finally did get here, we had
to wait another day because the weather was too bad
to get up into the mountains. So, you know, I
was working with much less time than I originally thought
it was going to So we're hiking up, we're in
the clouds. I'm worrying a little bit about you know,
what's going to happen now? And we hike up up up, up, up,

(35:54):
get to the top of this mountain. It's like a
knife edge ridge, very thin ridge that we're climbing at
this point, and we get to the spot where I
see these big, deeply imprinted round tracks on this ridge.
And the ridge, like the tops of the mountains, is
like like tundra, which you would imagine thunder like lichen
and moss almost on the surface of the soil. And

(36:18):
I asked the Armley, so what's this and he explains
something that is one of the absolute coolest things I
have ever seen out in the natural world, one of
the coolest things I've ever seen. This was something that
he called in what is known as a grandfather trail,
and a grandfather trail is a spot on these knife

(36:42):
edged ridges throughout Alaska and maybe other brown bear territory
where grizzly bears, where brown bears will step into these footprints,
the same footprints year after year after year. So imagine
like seeing bear tracks, right, you were to imagine the
path of a bear, and you would see each bear

(37:03):
track in the dirt or the mud, but instead of
it being in the dirt or the mud, it is
pressed like twelve inches deep into the moss into the
mountain's surface, into the soil, but like a foot deep,
and just like perfectly laid out tracks, so it's not
like it's a trail. It's just like track track, but
twelve inches deep, pressed into the surface. And what these

(37:26):
bear do is they step into those prints every year
and they push their paws down there and they leave
scent deposits. I'm imagining it's kind of like a buck
making a scrape. They're leaving a chemical signature, a message
of sorts, to communicate their presence, their dominance, anything else
like that. And so all sorts of different bears come

(37:46):
up and they walk these trails, and when they walk
these trails, they carefully press their feet exactly into those
steps as they walk across the ridge to leave this message.
And what Biorna explained was that in these places is
these same trails have been used since the glaciers melted away,
so thousands of years, these trails, these prints have been

(38:10):
pressed into by different brown bears over the course of
hundreds and hundreds of generations of different bears. So I
was standing there on top of a mountain looking at
the tracks that thousands of different brown bears over the
course of thousands of years, had pressed their paws into
I mean, it was just a wild thing to consider

(38:33):
and to see. I mean, as far as I'm concerned,
grizzly bears are the epitome of wildness. And here was
a place to see and touch something that had been
created by and touched by that emblem of wildness for

(38:57):
thousands of years. It was like one of the most
direct connections I've ever had to something that happened so
so so long ago. It connected me back to I
don't know. I don't have the words yet. I have
not had the time yet to think about exactly how
to explain this, except to say that it was a

(39:18):
powerful experience and something to see and something to be
near and to imagine all the wild stuff that happened
right there where I was standing. So very cool moment,
and I kind of was talking to Biorn about this.
I went, manly, this is one of the coolest things
I've ever seen. And then he says to me, well,
what's also really cool is that there's probably still some

(39:39):
bucks on the other side of this cliff, so maybe
we should go check that out before it gets dark,
which was a good point, and so We kind of
sneak our way over to the edge and then eventually
have to lay down and belly crawl up to this
cliff because there's a sheer cliff drop down into one
of these bowls, and just as we're getting there, the
clouds parked and the sun setting just this beautiful light

(40:01):
is kind of shining in now from the side, and
we creep over the edge and look down to this
bowl and here is like, I don't know, like an
Alaskan Eden, this perfect landscape, bright green, open meadows with
scattered trees and boulders and deer everywhere. There's does feeding

(40:22):
over here. There's bucks feeding over there, there's does better there,
there's a buck better over there, there's two bucks fighting here.
There's just every different place you looked there was deer
doing their thing, and you're viewing it all from like
a bird's eye view. I'm way at the top of
the mountain looking down at the deer. I don't know.
It was like being a drone looking over all top
of her beat. Like I said, a bird's I view

(40:43):
an eagle flying over top of this scene. It was
really kind of bizarre to experience and see deer from
this perspective and just absolutely beautiful. So we're up there
and I'm just watching. Bijorn's like, well, you're gonna shoot one,
and I know, I was kind of like, I don't
know if I want to shoot one. I don't know,

(41:03):
I don't know what I want to do in this situation.
I just kind of want to watch right now. So
I just pulled up my binoculars and just watched for
a while and looked at all the different deer and
started wrestling with, you know, whether or not I wanted
to shoot one. And I'm trying to also figure out, like,
you know, are these young bucks, are these mature bucks?

(41:23):
Or these big bucks? Are these small bucks? Is this
you know, is this the right situation to shoot one?
Is it not? Is it too soon? Is it just right?
Is it? You know? Am I running out of time?
All of these things started, you know, rushing through my head.
After I first was taken aback by the whole thing
and took it in, that next phase was like, okay,
now what I had all these different things I had
to think about, And so I'm looking at deer and

(41:44):
Biora was kind of joking about how he never watched
deer so much in his life as he does when
it's with me. Because again, I'm taking my time with this.
And as I'm sitting there thinking about stuff and debating
about whether or not I want to take one, clouds
rolled back in and we're just completely and everything's invisible again,

(42:05):
and I'm thinking, like, ah, geez, I guess like mother
Nature might just made the decision for me, because this
looked like a big cloud. It looked like everything was cloudy.
And it's funny how when you're in it, it feels
like everything is cloudy and socked in. It kind of
looks like, okay, this is everywhere. But somehow, every time
I ever got to thinking that, relatively quickly it would

(42:28):
open up and then you realized you were just in
this little world that felt that way, but there's a
much larger world around you that was open. And so
as we're all stocked in it's cloudy, I start to,
you know, chat with Beorn about kind of how you know,
just started verbalizing what was inside my mind, how I
didn't want to end it too soon, but at the
same time I want I knew that we were running

(42:49):
out of time, and really what I wanted was ah
as I said earlier, like a good representative of the species,
a mature buck. I didn't really care about the antlers.
I wanted a deer that was relatively mature, that would
you know, have, you know, a good bit of meat
and you know, be a good average illustration of what

(43:11):
blacktail deer are all about. That was kind of my
realistic goal for this trip. And so he says, well,
you know there's probably at least one, if not two
down there that would be at least four. I was like, oh, really,
like a four year old. That's you know, in my
world of white tails, like a four year old is
a pretty damn good deer. So he kind of explained it, like,
you got to remember these are different, obviously different than
white tails, even different from black tail deer and Prince

(43:33):
of Wales Island or kodiak. These are smaller antler deer
up here because of the habitat and the elevation and everything.
So you know, you gotta don't assess too much by
the antlers, which is a good reminder for us down
here in the lower forty eight two. So lucky, luck luckily,
that's what I'm trying to say. Luckily, the clouds part
again and we can see everything again, and Jorn's like, yeah,

(43:56):
like that one right down there, I bet you he's
a four year old. I have all this deer and
he is what I would call this, Well, they were
calling a fork. I would call a six pointer, almost
a seven pointer, because you kind of hang a ring.
You know, in Michigan we say if you can hang
a ring on it, you can count as a point.
So I'm gonna call him a seven pointer. But like

(44:18):
you could tell, the antlers were heavier and darker than
the other deer. His g twos were kind of thick
and bladed, which I thought was pretty cool. And then
he's got this pudgy belly and these deer, like I mentioned,
they're short and stocky, and they're like they've got pot bellies.
So that kind of ended up being the way you
could tell if it was a mature deer because the
fat ones were those older bucks. So there ends up

(44:41):
being one of these pot belly deer that is relatively
close to me broadside and feeding, and two bucks are
like sparring right in front of him. It was like
very cool taking it all in. So when I see that,
and Beorna explained that was a mature bouck. Guy just said, okay,
you know what, that's that's the deer I want. Then,
so got lined up, got comfortable. It was, you know,

(45:02):
a perfect shooting position. Again, this is a rifle hunt,
which is something I don't do a lot of, but enough.
But was nice that I could be laying down. I
was like in a prone position, elbows on the ground,
I had a little bipod in the front of my rifles.
I had like great support and yeah, got a shot
in broadside, dropped him in his tracks. Absolutely gorgeous. You know,

(45:25):
the whole thing was just gorgeous, and it was pretty wild.
I mean, it was just like a marathon of a day.
Shot this blacktail got a really good, quick ethical kill.
We hiked down off the mountain down into that bowl.
We're able to recover the deer, do some work, and
then we kind of got to realize and like, oh, well,

(45:47):
it's gonna get dark really quickly here and this is
super thick bear country. We're gonna have to either figure
we're going to figure out how to get this deer
out here quick and ideally not after dark. So we
just got to work skinning, quartering, packing, you know, gutting
ahead of all that, and you know, from Bjorn's perspective,

(46:07):
the best thing would be to just get the deer
back to camp and then just do it fast and
you know, make some noise, have your gun close to you,
have a bullet chambered while you're doing all this because
you don't want all this smell and blood and gust
to be around you, and then have your back to
a bear approaching. So you know, he chambered around and

(46:28):
just kind of kept an eye on things while we
got to work. And fortunately, no bear problems, no issues.
We got that deer all packed away. After dark. We
ended up having to hike in the dark, but that
was fine. Traversed around this mountain, got back to camp,
and you know, there's no big trees up high in
the alpine. There's that kind of scrubby stuff. So we

(46:50):
basically just had to hang the meat on these little
scrub pines like three feet off the ground, which was
not gonna help with bears at all, but it would
hopefully help with Martin's American Martins, which I guess can
be kind of aggressive and get into your food. So
we did that. Turns out that didn't help. We did
not have bear problems, but we did have a martin

(47:11):
get into my meat and eat some of the meat,
and he actually stole my knife. I had a Montana knife,
like one of their ultra lights that has the handle
wrapped in para cord, and I'd use that to gut
my deer. So that paracord had soaked up a lot
of you know, just blood and bile and who knows
whatever else's liquids and stuff. So I'm sure it smelled

(47:32):
really bad and there's some dangling cord off of it.
So instead of putting that in my tent or something,
I just left it there with the meat on the
ground because I didn't want that in my tent and
attract bears. So the next morning that when I go
over there to check the meat, not only was the
meat bag chewed up, but my knife gone. So my
assumption is that that martin took it, dragged it off somewhere,
and it's hidden underneath some bush or in a hole

(47:54):
or something. But we actually follow the martin up in
the tree over top of us, just hanging out there watching,
which was interesting. Cute little critter, but that was a hunt.
That was the hunt well, the next morning we actually
hiked back up to the summit because we had a
little more time that day. Hiked up there and just
glassed that bowl and watched to see if a bear

(48:14):
would come on the gut pile. Nothing did, but we
saw a bunch of deer still in there, so I
got to watch some more deer, have some good chats,
got to check out that Grandfather trail again. And then
that afternoon did the hike down the mountain back to
the cabin. And that was a death march because now
I've got a full deer in my back. Bjorn actually
shot a deer that morning too, so Bjorn had a
deer in his back and all of his backpacking and

(48:36):
hunting gear. I had a deer in my back and
all my backpacking and hunting gear, so heavy packs. Going
down this super steep, wet jungle mountain. Every step you're
like falling down and something or tripping on one of
these bushes. Your gun stuff, Your gun's getting caught up
in the Devil's club and hanging up on things. It
was just kind of a It was a trip, but

(48:59):
made it down and survived it. Just find grilled up
some backstrap and heart on the open fire that night.
Back of the cabin told a lot of good stories.
Colin and Bjorn had a lot of fun stuff to
share from their previous adventures, and it was just a
hell of a trip, a great experience. I learned that,

(49:22):
you know, there's some things about deer that like deer deer, right,
like white tails, black tails, mule deer, that there's some
things they share in common, you know, like they lived
by their noses. That was a big one, right, That
was something that kicked me in the butt on this
first stock. But at the same time, it's so interesting
to hunt these different versions of deer in these different

(49:43):
kinds of places, to see how they operate differently. You know,
in this case, you know, these deer felt very comfortable
on the open because they're not used to humans messing
with them. So basically, if you could get to this place,
you could find you know, virgin territory where deer were
being deer hanging out in these wide open meadows because

(50:04):
they weren't threatened by us, And that was cool to see.
I think one special thing about traveling to these still
wild places is that you get to see deer operating
as they did before they learned to associate, you know,
humans with danger, and so I found that to be
really special and valuable and worthwhile to see. So I

(50:28):
just came await from this trip with a new found
respect for sick of blacktail deer, a new found respect
for the terrain they live in. I felt like when
I had seen previous blacktail deer hunts, like on you know,
people in Kodiak or Steve's hunts on Prince of Wales,
it never looked that rugged. Maybe I just hadn't been
paying attention enough, but it always kind of seemed like
there's some kind of like nice easy hills and it

(50:49):
didn't seem like tough country. But at least this hunt,
I felt like we were in some you know, we're
in some stuff. We're up there, you know, we're traversing
ridgeline that if I took one wrong step, I'd be
sliding down along ways. We are steep stuff with heavy packs.
That you just had to respect the territory and respect

(51:10):
the deer that lived there, And that was eye opening
and impressive. So I took that away from this hunt too.
And I think if I were to, you know, provide
any kind of guidance for somebody who wanted to do
a black tail deer hunt themselves, you know, still having

(51:30):
relatively little experience myself, I would tell you a couple
of things. Number One, if you can find a way
to get to one of these places away from people,
I think you're going to have a really special experience.
That's first and foremost. So I talked to, you know,
the people I talked to mentionally, Hey, it's different when
you're on a road system, and there is there are
places you can hunt black tails on the road system

(51:50):
in southeast Alaska and you can have success, but they're
they're going to be more like your white tails. They're
much more edgy, they're much more cover dependent, they're pressured,
and so you would have to hunt them like you
hunt pressure deer down here. But if you can find
a way to get a floatplane trip or a bush
plane and get dropped off into one of these places,

(52:11):
and yet that does take some extra money and resources
in time, so that's not realistic in every situation. But
if you can get some bodies together and pull some
money to get that and go into one of these
places that's really off the beaten path. Even if it's
once in your lifetime to see these deer in their
natural environment doing the things they were doing three hundred,

(52:33):
four hundred, five hundred years ago. It's, as far as
I'm concerned, worth seeing once. And maybe it's not blacktail.
Maybe maybe you are going to do one hunt like
this in Alaska or Canada or somewhere. Maybe it's caribal,
maybe it's moose, maybe it's black bear. Whatever it is,
I would say that every hunter an angler, it would

(52:59):
be worse while if you could somehow save up the
money to go up to one of these places and
experience it just once, at least once in your life,
just to see how it used to be. I think
that was one of the biggest epiphanies. I had. One
of the greatest things that kept coming up over and
over and over again during my couple weeks up there.
It was that we used to have this, We used

(53:21):
to have some version of this down in the lower
forty eight, whether it be millions and millions and millions
of salmon running up our rivers every year, or whether
it was great, big herds of deer that were relatively
comfortable in the open and feeding and not constantly on
edge and not constantly threatened. We used to have places

(53:44):
you could hike out and hunt in where there was
the most impressive predator in the world present all over
the place. We used to have grizzlies and brown bears
all over the lower forty eight states. This was a
wild country and you had to respect that. And when
you walked across North Dakota, you were in grizzly country

(54:07):
and you were respecting the land and the wild critters
out there, and your senses were turned up to eleven
because you weren't at the top of the food chain.
And I don't care what you think about that. It
changes the dynamic. It makes it more electric. And if
you've never spent time in brown bear or grizzly country,
I can tell you that it changes your relationship with it.

(54:31):
And I personally believe it changes it in a positive way,
in a way that you are humbled by the landscape
and the animals around you, and because of that, you
appreciate it more. I don't know how to describe this

(54:53):
in any other kind of way, but imagine that kind
of feeling, like where you're driving down the highway and
then all of a sudden, like you witness a car
accident right in front of you, or someone swerves in
front of you and you almost hit them and you
just narrowly escape, or whatever. You get this massive adrenaline
dumb right, or some other thing almost happens to you,
like a bad thing almost happens. You have this huge

(55:15):
rush of adrenaline, hyperventilating. Your whole body is on fire
for a second, right, for many of us, In those moments,
your memory goes into hyperdriver, or you almost go into
a slow motion where like everything is clearer and crisper,
and you remember it all. It like imprints into your
brain so perfectly. You can remember those moments as if

(55:35):
they were yesterday, as if it was a movie playing
out in your mind. Right, that's what happens in these
intense moments. Well, that same kind of thing, to a degree,
occurs when you are in such a wild landscape that
you are no longer top of the pole, not top
of the totem pole. Right, Everything is more vivid, the

(55:56):
colors are richer, the sounds matter more, the smell are
more pungent. And that was like every day in Alaska
you felt like that. And so this is a long
winded way of saying that we used to have these
incredible wildlife populations and these wild, wild wild places and
these infinitely dark skies. This was everywhere down here, and

(56:19):
we've lost much of it. We still have pockets, We
still got our things. We still have white tailed deer,
we still have elk, and it's incredible that we don't
bring these animals back. But it used to be so
much more and you can still experience it in British
Columbia or Alaska or the Yukon, different places like this,

(56:41):
and I think it's worth seeing and worth remembering, worth
remembering that there's still stuff like that worth fighting for,
and that we have so far to go still down
here in the lower forty eight. Like there's this risk
of shifting baseline syndrome, which we've talked about before, But
basically this idea is that every one of us, when
we're born and we're kids and we experienced the natural world,

(57:04):
we kind of set our baseline of what wild is
from what we experience as young people. So what my
wild was is what I experienced in the nineties and
early two thousands that felt wild to me, those levels
of wildlife that felt good to me, right that was
my baseline, And if I didn't know anything else other
than that, I might think, well, that's how it used

(57:25):
to be, that was those of the good old days.
But I wouldn't know that. Fifty years prior to that,
or eighty years prior to that, or one hundred and
fifty years prior to that, things were so much different,
maybe so much wilder, maybe so much more undeveloped, so
many more animals. That baseline keeps changing, and we keep
accepting this new baseline because all we've personally ever known,

(57:47):
so our new normal, though, might be god awful compared
to what the normal baseline was for someone twenty years before,
and twenty years before and twenty years before. And so
by going up north to this place that was still
relative untouched, it was kind of a resetting of the
baseline for me, and I realized, and I was reminded
of the fact that, man, maybe if I had been

(58:08):
born two hundred years earlier, I would have seen this
down in northern Michigan or Montana. But we we lost
a lot of it. I'm very thankful we haven't lost
all of it, and I'm gonna fight hard to make
sure we don't lose the rest of it, but let's
make sure we don't screw up these last best places too,
And I think it'd be worth, like I said, everyone
having that experience at least once. So that's one thought.

(58:31):
Second thought, Southeast Alaska's wet. That's no surprise. That's not
news to anyone's ears. That's been said many times before.
But it's one thing to hear, it's another thing to
experience it. Make sure you've got really good rain gear.
Make sure you've got rain proof boots. I brought waterproof

(58:51):
leather boots, but I also brought knee high rubber boots
based on Berange recommendation, and I ended up wearing those
a lot, just like in day to day life around
the camp. Around Juno fishing, like was almost always in
the high rubber boots, and a lot of guys do
that there they're wearing their extra toughs and now I
understand why. So definitely bring rubber boots. Definitely bring the

(59:12):
best waterproof stuff you can bring. I had waterproof stuff, sacks,
waterproof backpack liner for my big backpack, waterproof everything, and
it was needed. So recommend that, you know, definitely come
prepared for bears. That's again, that's nothing no surprise I
think for anybody. But I do think like you just

(59:34):
have to be really respectful of that fact in these
places that they're there. You don't need to fear them,
you don't need to let them stop you from going
and experience in these places. You just have to respect
it and be properly prepared. And if I learned anything
from Bejorn, it was that it was that you need
to be prepared for all circumstances, but also understand that
they don't want to mess with you. Nine point nine

(59:55):
times out of ten, read their body language, talk to them,
avoid if need be, don't escalate the situation, and most
of the time they're gonna go on their way. So
so that was that was a good reminder. And I
brought bear spray. I had my rifle, of course, and
I also brought a ten milimeters pistol. And the key

(01:00:16):
thing is to always make sure you have stuff with
you like a gun or bear spray is never going
to do any good if it's in your backpack, on
your back, or if it's ten feet away while you're
taking a piss. Always have your thing. That was a
key thing that Bjorn mentioned, like you know, don't even
go to the outhouse without spray or your pistol or
something like, always be prepared just in case. So that

(01:00:37):
would be something else I would note for anyone planning
a trip like this for the first time. And I
guess the last thing I would say, and again, this
is not like a thorough how to of this trip.
These are just more some overarching thoughts. But the last
thing I would say is that this trip also I
realized like an aft like looking back on it, and
Alaska in general is more accessible than maybe I realized.

(01:00:59):
I kind of always looked at Alaska as out of reach.
I kind of looked as like prohibitively expensive, like out
of my league. And by doing this trip, this is
my second time to Alaska and the most I've been
involved in like planning logistics and doing stuff myself, I
kind of realized that it's not that much different than

(01:01:22):
planning any other kind of big trip like this, like
whether it be going to the Rocky Mountains for the
first time or going on a camping trip to the
Grand Canyon, whatever. Like there's planning, there's logistics, there's definitely
things you need to have, you know, in order and
it definitely is an investment in some travel costs, but
not disproportionately more those other things, Like a plane ticket

(01:01:42):
up to Juno was no different than if I wanted
to take a plane ticket to California or something. So
I definitely came out of this trip realizing that I
could do this more often, and I could take my
family there more often, Like this is not out of
my league, nor is it out of yours. And as
I said a few minutes ago, I think my big
thing is see it at least once, experience it at

(01:02:06):
least once. It's your country just as much as anybody else's,
and it is an unbelievable gift that we still have
places like this. If we're going to keep places like this,
we need to experience them so we can care about
them and know them enough to continue that fight. So
that is kind of where I end on this whole thing.

(01:02:28):
I'm looking forward to getting back up there get I'm
looking forward to continue to follow what's going on in
Alaska and caring about the issues up there in Alaska,
just like I care about things down in here in
Michigan or Idaho or Montana. You know, a couple things
worth noting if you are ever interested in going on
a black bear hunt in the Tongas National Forest, or

(01:02:50):
a deer hunt like this, or if you want to
go salmon fishing or do any of these things that
are down there, we're just incredible opportunities for this stuff.
Pay close attention what's going on with the Tongus National Forest.
Like I mentioned, this is an incredible place, seventeen million
acres I believe, but it has been in to varying

(01:03:11):
degrees at risk. A handful of years ago, the previous
presidential administration had removed the roadless rule protections from nine
million acres of this forest, So more than half of
the forest lost protections that had been placed on it
several decades prior. That kept this place from getting clear cut,

(01:03:33):
That kept this place from getting new roads punched into
the last few places that don't have roads. This is
one of our last best wild places. And so they
had placed these roadless rule protections on it in the
early two thousands that would protect those areas that had
not yet been carved up in clearcut, because a lot
of it had. And in those places there's all sorts
of like ecological ramifications and downsides, for example, in the

(01:03:56):
places that were clearcut, which again were big chunks. What
happens is that you clearcut a forest, and you know,
down in the whitetail world, when we think about cutting trees,
we think about benefits to wildlife, and there are some
immediate benefits when you cut trees in that you're getting
sunlight to the ground and new growth. Right. But clear cutting,

(01:04:16):
especially in forested ecosystems up here up north especially has
you know, trickle down effects that are not so good.
So in the immediate couple of years after that you
would see better food available for blacktail deer. But blacktail
deer need old growth forests because they need protection from snows.

(01:04:38):
They need to survive these gnarly, gnarly winters up there,
and old growth high canopy forest is the habitat that
they need to survive that. Now, what happens is that
when you get these clearcuts, they lose a bunch of
their wintering habitats. So that's bad, but they do some food.
But then you have these clear cut areas that do
start growing back, and they start growing back very thick

(01:04:58):
and all the same level. So what you eventually have
is something called canopy exclusion, where these second growth forests
get to a point at I don't know, fifteen twenty five,
thirty five years old, where they are forests. Again, they're
very thick forests, and they are completely dark forests on
the top, and so there's no sunlight that gets to

(01:05:20):
the bottom, and there's no diversity in the age structure
of the forest, and so there's no understory. And what
you have then is a deer desert. What deer need
there is old growth in which you have naturally occurring
diversity and aige structure of forests because you've got the
big old trees that provide your winter cover and your canopy.

(01:05:42):
But then there's dead and dying trees scattered throughout. So
you get these different pockets and openings where sunlight does
come in, and so you get understory and you get
over story, and so what you want is a balance
of both of those things. There are examples where there's
been like wildlife thinnings coming into these second growth force
and trying to recreate that. So trying to create some

(01:06:03):
pockets and open up things a little bit, and that's
a good thing, but the big thing is we can't
have these clear cuts happening again that are not only
bad for blacktail deer, but they're also bad for salmon.
They're bad for the streams, they're bad for the trout,
all the different fish species in these rivers. When you
clearcut these rivers, you remove the habitat that's preserving the

(01:06:25):
banks of the streams. You get siltation and dirt and
erosion and all stuff rushes into the rivers. It covers
up the gravel beds that spawn that salmon need to spawn.
All sorts of different kind of trickled on effects from it.
So this is my rambling way of saying that the
roadless Rule has been something that has been very good
for fish and wildlife in that area. We had it

(01:06:48):
for a while. It was taken away in like two
thousand and I can't remember eighteen or nineteen or something
like that. But then again they were put back in
place recently a year or two ago, so we have
those roless rule protections on the tongus. Again, there are
work that's work being done to have better habitat for

(01:07:08):
deer and for fish. They're doing some of this wildlife
fitting work. They're trying to find ways to have some
level of timber harvest because hey, we need some logging,
we need jobs, we need that, we need managed habitat
for wildlife. That's a good thing, but we need to
do it in such a way that it's not going
to destroy the habitat, that's not going to level these things,
that's going to still preserve the wild spots that we

(01:07:28):
have left. So I'm very much in supportive of the
roleless rule. I would suggest you learn about it because
you know the political pendulum swings, and I would not
be surprised if we see a debate come up about
these things again in the future. And if you want
to chase blacktail deer someday or go see this place someday,
you won't experience the same thing I did if we

(01:07:50):
lose those protections. And I hope if you've listened to
this you can see the value in protecting these places
and hopefully being able to see them someday self too.
So that is the story of my Alaskan deer hunt.
I actually got to stay around for about another just
a little less than another week, and got to go

(01:08:11):
in a whole nother excursion learning about salmon and the
issues impacting salmon. I got to do some saltwater fishing
in the ocean. I caught caught coho salmon. I saw
humpback whales. I went to Bristol Bay. I caught massive
rainbow trout, the biggest grailing I've ever seen in my life,
pink salmon. Just all sorts of really, really fascinating things.

(01:08:38):
I learned about, some incredible places, some incredible animals, and
once again I'm just more fired up than ever to
do whatever i can to keep these places wild, to
keep these wild animals out there, and to make sure
that all of us and our kids can experience these
things someday in the future as well. So that's my story.

(01:08:58):
I'm sticking to it. Hope you enjoyed this one, and
if you have any questions, you know, hit me up
on Instagram or social media. I'll try to answer some
questions here in the coming days and weeks about this
hunt and about this experience, if there's any of you
that want to try something similar in the future. But
I think that's it for today. Starting next week, we'll

(01:09:19):
be right back into our usual Whitetail content. The season's
kicking off here in Michigan in just a handful of days,
so I'm about to get real serious about white tails.
I'm sure you are too, so until then, best of luck.
If you are out there hunting already, you know, dot
your eyes, cross your t's. If you're getting ready for

(01:09:40):
the season to start here in a couple of days,
shoot your bow. And until next time, my friends, stay
wired to hunt.