Josh First's Blog

I am recovering from Alaska

To our three loyal readers, my apologies for not posting in two weeks. The reason our blog here has been quiet is I was away in Alaska, almost every day spent in remote locations with no cell or wifi, the nights spent falling asleep immediately, and I just returned a couple days ago.

Alaska tourism can be done several ways – cruise ship, fly to main city like Anchorage or Fairbanks and use tourism services to sightsee and experience, or, my preferred way, go all-in hands-on. And so I spent ten days in remote locations, hunting, fishing, and hiking, marveling at God’s creation. Fortunate am I to have a long time friend who lives there, and who has long shared my outdoor adventure interests here in PA and there in AK. While he was looking for a moose more than anything, he did have a grizzly tag in his pocket, and that is the animal “we” ended up getting.

I say “we” because we were a team, because only a fool hunts alone in grizzly country, especially around the salmon streams when the fish are running, and because it takes two large men to effectively get out and cape out a large bear after one of them gets the critter. Large here was about 600 pounds; it was trying to elude a 1200-pound monster that nearly ran me over, which is terrifying and exhilirating. It is my friend’s bear, not mine. But I was “in on the kill” as used to be said in the old days.

Despite having field dressed and butchered well over a hundred big game animals in my life, I have never before seen connective tissue between muscle and skin like on his grizzly bear. We had three custom fixed blade hunting knives, and they all went dull about 3/4 of the way through the job (my JRJ made of ATS-34 was the last to go dull and the one we both alternatively used as we closed in on finishing the job). Dull due to extremely tough hide, a thick fur filled with dirt and grit and small rocks after we winched it through the woods, and that unbelievable connective tissue that just did not want to be cut. The part of skinning a big game animal that is usually the easiest, pulling the skin off the carcass, was really challenging and tiring with this grizzly. Again, I have neither seen anything like it, nor could I have been challenged to adequately imagine the toughness of that connective tissue. No wonder these huge beasts bite the heck out of each other without showing real wounds!

While I had a black bear tag in my pocket, and wolves were on the menu, I was actually most excited to be present for my friend when he got a moose. Getting a moose out of the woods is a quintessential American wilderness experience, and the one I have not done before. A trip to AK just to eventually help your friend get his moose out of the woods is a worthwhile trip, regardless of what else one might do there. However, when the beautiful male grizzly presented itself, my friend took it. As for the black bear tag I purchased, I actually walked right up to a small black bear deeply enmeshed in a blueberry bush on a steep mountainside drowning in the roar of a nearby glacial stream’s torrential rush. I could have easily killed it, but I would not shoot a bear that small here in Pennsylvania, and so I did not shoot that bear. I think if I am going to remove a black bear from the face of the sacred Alaskan earth, it will have to be a real wall hanger. So I watched this small one duck down, try to hide, and then run like hell up the mountainside, over logs, rocks, and sticks and through devil’s club like nothing was in its way. Even the small bears are impressive.

As for the salmon fishing, I could have as many pinks as the law allows, and my friends’ freezer grew full of them and short of room they preferred to save for the silver coho salmon. And so I dutifully fished daily for the no-show coho, and felt the pang of defeat when the report came in from Juneau that the cohos were there in force, on the day I was leaving. Fishing is almost always “You should have been here yesterday” or “You should have stayed one day longer,” and this rule of thumb applies just as much to Pacific salmon species as it does to striped bass or tuna in the Atlantic.

Thanks for checking in here, friends. I had a hell of a grand trip to Alaska, got my head cleared, my lungs expanded, my blood moving, my heart pumping, my legs working again, and reveled in the this-is-oh-so-right feeling of a pack and rifle over my shoulder.

A little bit of risk is good for us sedentary Western men; it keeps us sharp, feeling alive. Combine risk with hard hunting, and you end up feeling your most alive possible. Back here in PA we have a month to go before pack-and-rifle early muzzleloader season, and then another month after that before bear and then deer seasons give us that brief but intense visit with our inner and most honest, truest paleo inside.

Pictures to come.

A 22″ grizzly skull may not sound that big by itself, but it was attached to a 600 pound body with enormous muscles and claws

Eldred Rock light house

The real center of town, the AK Fish & Game office

a bear head before being boiled

A ton of work and many lengths of rope spliced together to get this thing out of the woods.

We beat the weeds looking for a bull moose, only to find one standing on the highway on a return drive home

Setting up a moose stand is like setting up a deer stand back East, except the moose stand comes with grizzly bears, wolves, and moose

Stalking AK black bear habitat is a lot like being in PA black bear habitat, except AK has blueberries -and- high bush cranberries, salmon berries, tons of mountain ash berries and rosehips, while PA is lucky to have any blueberries or blackberries at all, due to our overabundant deer

A pink “humpy” salmon, probably the most prolific edible Pacific species. Back East we pay five bucks for a can containing about one quarter of this fish’s meat. I was allowed six a day.

A fine looking salmon river that you must share in close quarters with cool grizzly bears on the one side, and annoying, jostling, foolish foreign tourists on the other

Whether you harvest an animal or not, simply being in Alaska with your pack and rifle is sufficient for a complete overhaul of mindset and heart

Endless vistas of countless mountainsides, each loaded with black bears, grizzly bears, sheep, caribou, and moose. A paradise of God’s creation.