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3. Troutnut's 2012 caribou hunt in the Alaska Range

GREAT story, stunning images, and excellent equipment (I have a Tikka too -sub MOA). Now that is living. Hunting stories like this are so full of vitality.

Love the very last section of the gear review:


You definitely know you are alive at such times.

Thanks for sharing your hunt.

Fantastic images and story. You are a lucky man. Good for you.

Great story and a beautiful landscape!

Jason - From the pictures, to the shooting, to the carrying, to the walking, to the sleeping in bloody clothes in bear country. You are a better man than I...........
congratulations!
dave

Sounds like quite the adventure. Congrats, Jason.

Well done Jason, beautiful shots! Like Paul, I too love the last section of the gear review! As an obsessed Ruffed Grouse hunter, I can totally relate to that one! Thanks for posting!

Hey Eric, I just walked in the door from chasing dusky's (former "blue" grouse) in some rugged canyons. I could sure use the four hooves of a centaur. And I missed twice -again! -which means 20 minutes of climbing to find each arrow. But I tend to get them all back, sometimes still intact.

Jason, the photos are fabulous! What amazes me the most is the colors in them - so vibrant and beautiful. I suppose that's what you get up in AK for fall colors, instead of trees it's the tundra shrubs that all turn so brilliant. Also, congrats on a successful hunt! Thanks for sharing it all with us.

Jonathon

That's exactly right. The tundra in the fall is spectacular.

At lower elevation, it's all gold from the aspens and green from the spruce. There's very little red in the trees, but the gold can be really radiant.

I can barely hit them with a shotgun, more power to ya hunting them with a bow. I'm sometimes amazed that my dogs actually remember what to do when I hit one. I'd like to get to Alaska one day and day chasing ptarmigan is definitely on my list of things to do there. I think I'd be pulled in a lot of different directions in that part of the world.

Well...I didn't say I hit that many of them. :) I get a few each season. And to be clear, I am not wing-shooting these grouse. I take them either on the ground, or when they tree with flu-flu fletching. This year a couple spots have more bids than usual, and I thought this would be the year I'd finally get a daily limit (3). But so far I'm 0/6 for the 3 days I've hunted. I'd been shooting well all summer, but switched to a different bow for small game hunting and it shoots a tad higher. I'm just grooved for that other bow and have had a heck of a time adjusting. I've shot JUST over every bird so far.

Jason, what's the camera?

Paul, the pictures from the first day hunting are from a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. It stopped working after that (I've beaten it up pretty badly) so I carried my Canon 20D DSLR around with my 70-200mm f/4L lens for all the packing.

Now there's a man who's prepared - he brings a back-up camera! I will actually have a second camera soon, one that I had lost in the woods and then got back! The fellow who found it on the trails behind my house recognized my face from photos of me I had on there and was visiting a garage sale at one of my neighbor's houses...the LCD screen was broken, however, so it's been sent off for repair under warranty (it says "shockproof" right on the front of the camera...). So now I'll have a back-up too.

Jonathon

The resolution looked mighty fine for a compact. I can see the mosquitoes around that caribou bull!

As I mentioned in the story, that first bull picture was actually taken a week before the trip -- it's one I could have shot if I'd brought my gun & tags. That one was taken with a rented Canon 7D, a better DSLR by far than my 20D. The other pictures on the first page of the story were taken with the 20D. Everything on the second page was taken with the compact. On the 3rd page, the top stuff is taken with the compact, and the 20D takes over on Sept 9th.

The Panasonic Lumix LX3 is a really nice compact camera, one of the earlier attempts to create a compact, carry-everywhere camera with a pro feature set and image quality. The current model in that line, the LX7, is even better. I do wish they both had a better optical zoom. Before I found out I could get a reasonable repair estimate for my LX3, I was looking into new cameras along those lines and these are the models I was considering. There are lots of nice cameras out there!

Thanks, Jason.