I have often heard it said that getting a moose on the ground is the easy part. Until this September I didn’t fully understand.



Denali and the Alaska Range from the north



After a very long absence from hunting large game I finally made up my mind to trade some fall fishing time for time in the woods trying to put some red meat in the freezer. As with many thing new and complex, the learning curve in moose hunting has been fairly flat for me. Without a mentor or more experienced folks to tag along with, I’ve been to trying and pick up tidbits of info here and there, glean some knowledge when the rare opportunity presents, but more than anything I’ve had to try and keep my head up while outdoors and learn the lessons that only careful observation can teach.




Preseason scouting and polishing up spotting skills.




I grew up hunting whitetail in the Midwest and that turned into my main outdoor pursuit for many of my formative years while working on farms in Wisconsin. I had an incredible mentor, an uncle that took me under his wing and showed me the what, when, and where. We were fairly proficient at harvesting each fall and bowhunting was a logical progression after a few years of slinging a rifle around. After a few bow seasons spent fruitlessly in treestands and cornfields and a few blown chances I finally connected and that experience remains one of my most memorable to date.

After moving to Washington state by myself at the age of eighteen I functionally tabled hunting altogether and have focused more on adventures involving mountain tops and rivers since.

Getting back in the saddle. Compared to deer moose are very different creatures indeed. Most of what I thought I knew about finding deer has little relevance in the domain of moose. There are some similarities I guess. Moose tend to sleep in the thick stuff, tend eat in the open, and congregate in the fall for the rut and so on. More than logical travel paths hunting moose seems to be all about real estate. The more you can see and effectively hunt the better your chances. The terrain and their movement patterns are on a much larger scale than anything I’ve tried to hunt before and being a fairly nocturnal animal for most of the “warm” season certainly doesn't make strategy development an easy task.





Typical landscape on the southern slope of the Alaska Range.







Moving over the high passes towards the north side of the range.

















For reasons I’ll elaborate on as the story unfolds I wasn’t able to devote much time to capturing quality images on this trip and the photo record is pretty incomplete. I’ve tried to cobble together some of the useable images from the hunt itself but you’ll have to bear with some crappy cell phone pics and blurry stuff as that is for the most part what I’ve got. You’ll also see a few re-treads if you’ve had a look at any of the fall related posts in the Fin’s and Feather’s forum recently.

Fall in Alaska is short but beautifully intense. It seems like almost overnight the trees and tundra light up with color and the landscape takes on a majestic vibrance no artist or photographer, or story teller can convey. The last two years I’ve hunted on the north side of the Alaska Range shares more topographical characteristics with the interior and northern part of the state as compared to the south side of the range which is heavily vegetated and home to nasty things like Devil’s Club and Slide Alder. The north side of the range tends to be wide open with tundra being the predominate vegetation. Smaller stands of spruce, birch, cottonwood, alder, and aspen fill in the river and creek bottoms. The landscape is generally rolling hills with long rounded and sweeping ridges. Cross-country travel is straightforward but walking the grassy hummocks and swamps in the lower elevations can be tedious if not strenuous. Moose habitat abounds.


More sparsely treed tundra landscape on the north side of the range





Spruce lined river valleys with willow banks are a favorite for moose in all seasons













To be continued.