The following weekend wasn’t flyable, though we waited around all weekend in hopes of the weather breaking. Just after the weekend things improved, so I flew my brother and his son into the hills on a Tuesday after work to see if they could find some success. He’d kill me if he knew I was sharing this info, but he forgot his stove at home and I found out well after I could make another flight. I had to work the next day, but the Alaskan aviation community is amazing. I reached out for help, and another local pilot graciously offered to drop a stove to my brother the next morning and insisted on nothing in return. If he happens to be reading this - thank you so much! Anyhow, my nephew managed to take a young bull that next morning. Tag #3 filled!
The next weekend my youngest and I were back at it. Like his brother’s hunt, we were unable to get into the mountains on Friday due to weather. Saturday was beautiful, though, so we headed into the mountains in the early afternoon. Due to the fact that we couldn’t fly and hunt in the same day, much of the day was spent playing football on the mountaintop while keeping an eye out for animals.
We didn’t see anything that day, so the next morning we set out to cover some serious ground in hopes of finding some over a distant mountain that we had seen from the air the previous day. As we started to climb, we looked back towards camp and saw a lone bull working its way down the middle of the valley close to camp. We quickly reversed course and went straight back the way we had come. A few weeks prior every caribou we saw was skittish and getting close was next to impossible. This one, though, behaved just as caribou sometimes do - it was curious, and came straight in to check us out. My son made an excellent shot and soon was helping me butcher his second caribou.
