After spending a few days waiting for a caribou to come close enough to shoot with a hand gun, without any luck, we decided to pack up and head back to the truck. While we were packing up our gear and loading up the sleds Travis spotted 3 big caribou bulls heading our way! He had his handgun ready and I immediately handed over my .45 with a full magazine. Then he proceeded to crawl on his belly up a small rise from our camp. And before I could dig out another magazine and load it full he was firing round after round at the group of 3. By the time I got to him with more ammo he had emptied both our guns and sadly didn't connect with any of the shots. In his defense the caribou were still about 50 to 75 yards out and neither one of us has ever attempted target practice at anything near that range with a handgun. By that point the caribou had slowly made there way quite a bit further away and Travis was dealing with nearly frozen hands after waiting for the best time to shoot with no gloves on.
We watched the caribou make there way over the horizon with our binoculars and Travis mentioned that it looked like two of them dropped their antlers! "That's what it looks like to me," I said to him. So we finished packing out gear and made for the tracks left in the snow by the 3 big bulls. After following their tracks for a few minutes we didn't come across any blood trail but we did find a pair of antlers shed by two of the caribou! "Well," I laughed, "looks like you scared the antlers right off them!" At least we weren't going home completely empty handed.
As we made our way back to the truck we came across a couple caribou right off our trail! At that point we were only a few miles from the road so shooting a firearm wasn't an option. So we took out our cameras and shot pics instead. The new photo on the main page of the blog was a snapshot Travis got of the pair. The bull was jumping and prancing around putting on quite a show.
After we had our fill of the two caribou we continued on and when we were about half way on the road that ran 2.5 miles in from the Dalton we came over a hill to a small herd of about 50 caribou milling around on the opposite hill side. We got to enjoy another show of two bulls butting heads for several minutes. As we we made our way down the hill towards the caribou they all took off running, that was pretty neat to witness.
We eventually got back to base camp, several hours later around sunset, decided to stay one more night and head home in the morning.
Overall the trip went well. Weather couldn't have been better. Hauling all that gas worked out great, Travis had figured out the mileage almost perfectly! And having the Arctic oven was definitely is a luxury to be had in the future.
On the way back we stopped a few times for restroom breaks and also made a stop at the Arctic Circle to get our "touristy" photos in front of the big sign just off the Dalton Highway.
To end this Adventure I have some photos and video from both Travis and I. The first pic was taken by Travis on one of the hill tops with some caribou antlers in the foreground, left by previous hunters, and the Brooks Range in the background. The second is an out of focus shot I took of the caribou pair we came across hiking back to the highway. The third and forth shots are of the small herd we stumbled onto almost back to our base camp. And the final photo was taken at the Arctic Circle on the way back to Fairbanks.
The video I stitched together comes from both Travis and I. The first segment was taken by Travis of the caribou pair not far from our hill top camp. The footage is a little shaky, but his camera has a 20X optical zoom so I sure that amplifies any unsteadiness. He swivels around to show the little hill we were camped on as well. And the second part was taken by myself of the small caribou herd.
Up next "The bear hunt."
No comments:
Post a Comment