Cooper James and his twin brother Taylor proved extremely lucky in the Fortymile Youth Caribou Hunt draw in 2016, as they EACH drew one of the coveted 30 tags available, giving them the golden tickets needed to hunt the Fortymile Caribou herd preseason — well before the open registration hunt began on September 29th. But as you’ll read, it’s still no slam dunk when you’re hunting this vast region that stretches north of Tok to the Canadian border and further West than you could possibly manage to travel unless you had an airplane at your disposal.

To start with, just to get to our RV basecamp in Chicken, Alaska we towed our 5th wheel toy hauler, that would double as our meat processing wagon, over 55o miles to the northwest of our home. Only one flat tire en route, repaired in Tok, would go flat by the next morning due to a poor quality repair remedied by a roundtrip drive 150 miles back to Tok from Chicken a few days later with Cooper’s velvet antlers that needed to go straight into the deep freeze at a cold storage shop in Tok…but I’m getting ahead of myself already.

With this Youth Hunt the season opened on August 10th, several weeks like I said before the general registration hunt on August 29th. We had 10 days of open hunting with no more than 28 other youth hunters, and in the end we only saw one.  The area is vast, with access from the Taylor Highway western side of the herd’s range as well as off the Steese Highway on the eastern side a good couple hundred miles away north of Fairbanks. Of course, a huge expanse in between these two areas could only practically be reached by bush plane, so no wonder we were blessed with not having to compete with other hunters.

Most of day 1, August 10th, of our hunt was just getting the flat repaired and driving the remaining 75 miles up to Chicken. We went for a short ride that afternoon/evening up to Boundary, 30 miles or so in the truck trailering the ATVs and very close to the border crossing into Canada en route to the famous Dawson City. It was a fun scouting mission, getting a lay of the land, crossing creeks, discovering old gold camps, and glassing the hillsides, but no Caribou were to be seen. It was warm. We did make some discoveries, including a trail that led up to the high country of the surrounding mountains, a plateau that looked promising for the following day’s hunt.

Day 2, August 11th, we rolled out of base camp in the dark, driving that bumpy washboard road up to Boundary (where you oddly fine brand new pavement just a few miles short of the Canadian border — some road to nowhere project that we must have paid dearly for). We unloaded the rigs in the dark and rolled down the trail, across the creek, up the first climb, and up the discovered trail through blueberry bushes and brush to the open high country. We stopped short as we came out of the brush and sent the twins on foot ahead of us to explore more stealthily, but alas no sign of movement anywhere across the slopes. We continued our exploration, discovering vantage point after vantage point, vistas as far as your eyes could see. We dreamed of the caribou that must certainly be roaming this high country, trying to build up winter stores of energy while avoiding mosquitos and flies. We rode a good 15 miles up and across the slopes, finding a flock or two of Ptarmigan along the way, seeking shelter from the rain at one point, sitting, glassing, watching, munching, hoping, praying, dreaming. Nothing. Not a single Caribou to be seen. Nor a bear. Nor a moose or any other living, tasty creature except Ptarmigan (our state bird, truly is a tasty game bird, which we hesitated to harvest for the noise the shotgun would make). We stayed till dark, some 15-16 hours in the field, the days are still too long this time of year. The drive back down the bumpy road to base cam made us all weary, but thankfully MamaBear was in the rig with delicious, warm food to lift and feed our spirits.

Day 3, August 13th, we decided to mix it up and ride the ATVs straight out of basecamp and up the too well known Chicken Ridge trail. We figured we’d run into hunters, but in the end we only saw one camp many miles off and it looked like they were packing up to leave already. We had heard we’d need to ride a good 10-15 miles out just to get above tree line and start having the chance to glass caribou. Indeed, around that point on the trail we actually started seeing loads of tracks, both caribou and wolf. We spotted one cow moose along the way as well, but despite the tracks right on the trail getting us excited, we weren’t seeing the herds of our imagination. We stopped short with the ATVs before each peak or rise, walking up slowly to try and glass the next vista. After 20 miles or so we took a good rest on a beautiful rocky ridge, glassing till our eyes were sore. We decided to push on, 22 miles, 23, maybe close to 25, before the weather started to suggest we might want to turn back. Dark skies, some wind gusts, and threatening rain. We had also spotted that distant party maybe another 5-10 miles out and they were heading our way. Might as well turn around we thought, so we did and less than a half mile back on the trail, when we were all starting to feel a little sleepy, Cooper suddenly said….(to be continued)

Stay tuned for the rest of the story…