Moose Hunting

The Moose (Alces Alces) is the largest member of the Deer family with antlers that are distinguishable by the palmation. The Moose inhabits areas of North America to include almost all of Canada, Alaska, the upper Rockies and much of New England. Moose have been re-introduced to some areas like NewFoundLand where they were re-introduced in the year 1904. They have since thrived there. Other areas like New Zealand, where they were introduced in 1910, and the Moose have not done as well. The most distinguishable characteristic of the moose is the large, palmated antlers that the male or Bull Moose grow. They also have extremely long legs that give the Moose a gangly appearance. The Moose prefers to trot but will occasionally break into a gallop and can reach speeds up to 34 mph. The adult male Moose is a giant and can weigh up to 1600 pounds. Moose Hunting is a favorite past time for many Americans and Canadians. Moose Hunting in Alaska and Moose Hunting in Canada is immensely popular with Hunters seeking Moose not only for the challenge of the Hunt but also for the head gear and the succulent meat they possess. Moose Hunting in Maine is also a popular tradition as is Moose Hunting in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. So when planning your next Moose Hunting Trip, it might be good to know some Moose trivia. The plural of Moose is not "Meese", but Moose. A Moose can swim for two hours and up to twelve miles without stopping. Moose Hunting is done in some of the most pristine and beautiful country in the world and is not something you, as a Hunter, will want to miss out on.

Moose hunting in the Secret Valley

The Secret Valley

Jim Brooks and I were in a lovely little valley of the Clear Delta River, deep in the Alaska Range. Dusk was near – moose feeding time. We quietly climbed the bluff behind our jack camp and eased along, binoculars sweeping canyons and valley.

In about 10 minutes Jim hissed, “Look. I don’t believe it. They’re practically in camp.”

He had spotted two bull moose. From 400 yards we lay prone and studied them.

One appeared black and massive, with big, yellow, polished antlers. He was bedded beneath a big spruce; the other, smaller, brownish bull, also with clean antlers, stood nearby, stripping willow twigs and leaves.

Moose season was to open next day. Would these bulls be our winter meat? Both of us had families to feed, and our goal was to put moose meat in our freezers – better than money in the bank.

“Let’s hope they’re still there in the morning,” I said. Dark was near when we started to return to camp. Within 50 feet a cock ptarmigan launched from underfoot and, cackling raucously, sailed toward the two bulls. We were sure the racket would spook them.

We hurriedly returned to check. They had ignored the bird.

It was the last day of August 1953, and we were on our first trip to what we came to call our “secret valley.” It was an Eden, an enchanted paradise, an honest Happy Hunting Ground.

A sourdough named Foster told Brooks about it. “Don’t tell anyone else,” he cautioned.

Jim and I hunted the valley together for three consecutive September hunting seasons; twice I hunted there alone. During those golden years we never saw another man track or person there.

The place was magic. For example, on one of my lone hunts, on a clear September night with a full moon, I lay warm in my sleeping bag. Something woke me. I remained quiet. Peering out of my lean-to, I saw a gray wolf walk into view. Moonlight was so bright the wolf threw a shadow. It stopped, 10 feet away. I heard it sniff, and it seemed to be looking around my camp. It must have known I was there – scenting powers of a wolf are legendary.

The animal stood for long seconds, then calmly walked away. It was my first visual encounter with a wolf.

On that August day in 1953 when Jim Brooks and I first went to the valley, mornings were frosty, the snow line on the rugged peaks of the Alaska Range was creeping down, moose antlers were mostly clean of velvet, and mountainsides were red and gold and purple.

We launched our Grumman canoe on the silty Delta River where it runs beside the winding, narrow, mostly-gravel Richardson Highway (now all pavement and paralleled by the four-foot diameter Trans-Alaska Oil pipeline).

Our outboard pushed us against the rushing silt-filled river for a short distance. It shallowed and became multiple channels that spread across a broad valley. For six miles we waded and lined, occasionally running the kicker.

The river changed abruptly to the Clear Delta, from dirty gray to window-glass clear where brawling, glacial, Eureka Creek empties into it.

The swift change was like night turning into day. The river now ran gently in a single deep channel through a narrower valley. We saw grayling and their shadows as they fled from the bow 10 feet beneath the canoe. Willows (moose and caribou pasture) lined the banks. On our right was a high bluff with frequent sprucegrown notch valleys – perfect daytime beds for moose.

To our left a distant ridge was vibrant with reds and yellows. Something there caught my eye.

“Look just below that big rock,” I told Brooks. He swung his binocular to the spot.

“What a beauty!” he exclaimed.

It was a big, dark grizzly digging parka squirrels – bear finger-food. I stopped the kicker and, as we watched, he leaped and swiped with massive paws at a squirrel burrow. Dirt flew.

I restarted the outboard. Its purr reached the bear. Abruptly, he stood on hind legs and peered our way. Alarmed, he galloped to the nearest willow patch, his silver-tipped coat rippling and shimmering with every bound.

“I’d sure like to have his hide,” I said, beating Jim to it by seconds. He grinned and said, “We’ll toss for the chance.”

We didn’t hunt for him. In a way that was a blessing, for in my mind’s eye that grand bowlegged, hump-shouldered white-clawed monarch still roams among those rugged, snow-capped mountains and rich valleys.

He was one of the three true silvertip grizzlies I can recall seeing in Alaska – most of Alaska’s grizzlies come in shades of brown. This guy was basically black with silver- tipped guard hairs.

A cow moose stood on the riverbank and stared at us as we passed. Mallards, widgeon and green-winged teal leaped from coves along the shore. Ptarmigan flew across the nearby mountainside, their partially-white winter plumage contrasting with the red bearberry and yellow willows.

I again stopped the outboard, and we drifted gently, staring at one of the most beautiful, scenic valleys in Alaska.

“This place is alive with game,” I commented.

“Yeah. I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Jim agreed.

Jim Brooks arrived in Alaska on his own in 1940 at the age of 18. During World War II, he flew B-24 Liberator bombers in Italy. In Alaska he had been a trapper, truck driver, bush pilot and weather observer. He had hunted widely in the Territory (statehood came in 1959).

I was a cheechako (a newcomer), a three-year resident. I taught wildlife management at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Brooks was one of my students. I had first arrived in Alaska six years earlier (in 1947) to work through the summer as a fishery patrol agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. After completing my studies of wildlife management on the G.I. Bill at Oregon State College (now University) and the University of Maine, I had returned to Alaska to teach.

Over the past half-century, I’ve hunted the lonely arctic Brooks Range, the stormy Alaska Peninsula, the coastal Kenai and southeastern Alaska rain forests. I have Technicolor memories of these grand wildernesses, but that then-lonely and beautiful valley in the Alaska Range remains the brightest memory of all.

As Jim and I worked our canoe upriver on that first visit, we were entranced by the abundant wildlife: a pair of beaver plunged into the water as we passed; three frolicsome otters looked inquiringly at us before they submerged; a bald eagle glided overhead; a young caribou bull trotted along the bank, curiously following our canoe a short distance.

We pitched two one-man tents in a “moosey” looking spot five or six miles up the Clear Delta. A nearby abandoned beaver dam formed a deep pool in which a dozen or more large grayling lazily finned. Tents pitched and firewood piled, we rigged a fly rod with a small wet fly. Jim cast into the beaver dam pool.

“Got one!” he exclaimed as the rod bent. He carefully urged the struggling fish ashore. I caught the next one.

We had all we could eat within a few minutes. We filled their cleaned body cavities with dried onions, salted and peppered them, and wrapped the fish in foil (then a new product) and cooked them in campfire coals – ambrosia. The knowledge that we found half-digested shrews in a couple of them didn’t spoil the feast.

We spotted the two bull moose later that evening.

After eyeballing these bulls with growing excitement, we reached camp after dark and enjoyed hot cocoa as we warmed ourselves by a small fire. Jim woke me about midnight as he re-inflated his collapsed air mattress. Then we enjoyed the musical howls of several nearby wolves.

“Think they’ll spook those bulls?” I asked.

“Doubt it. Wolves have plenty of food right now – they don’t need to tackle prime bull moose,” he guessed.

A dismal rain dribbled on us at daylight, and we left camp wearing hip boots and rain parkas. We sneaked along the bluff, hoping the two bulls had stayed put. They were gone.

We hiked on. Suddenly Jim dropped flat, silently gesturing. I shoved my face against wet moss.

“There,” he whispered, pointing to an open hillside several hundred yards away. “The same bulls.”

They were too far for careful shooting.

The two slowly walked toward the area they had used the previous day. Clearly nervous, they stopped frequently to look around. Wet antlers flashed yellow/white with every turn of their heads. We suspected they were aware of our camp. They seemed reluctant to remain where they were and slowly walked out of sight into a spruce-filled draw.

“Let’s let ’em go for now,” I suggested. “They’re kinda spooked, but they’ll probably hole up in that draw. We can come back for ’em when they bed down for the day.”

We hated to leave them, but to crowd them when they were obviously nervously alert would likely prove disastrous. Instead we hunted upstream, following the edge of the bluff and searching with glasses.

Shortly, a big bull with antlers that spread close to 50 inches ran through an opening in the spruces about 200 yards away. We were both so surprised that neither of us shot – and alibied that we were afraid to for fear of spooking the first two.

“The woods are full of ’em,” Jim muttered, as we sheepishly watched the bull crash through brush to the river. He was spooked, either from hearing or scenting us, or perhaps by wolves, for he splashed into the river and bounded and swam downstream for more than half a mile before he humped his way onto the far bank and trotted into concealing willows.

Continuing on – more carefully now – we glassed every little notch canyon we passed, dodged wet willows and mentally kicked ourselves for letting three nice bulls slip out of our hands before six o’clock in the morning.

Over the next four hours, we saw three distant cow moose, but no bulls. About 10 o’clock, deciding the two original bulls had had time to bed down, we returned toward them.

By early afternoon we were pretty glum. The two bulls weren’t where we expected them to be, nor in any neighboring valley we could glass.

At midafternoon we were perched on a high point three miles upstream from camp, glassing. I saw movement in a stand of spruce.

“Big antlers, Jim,” I said quietly. They were the biggest we had seen.

“There’s another,” Jim said. Behind the moose I had seen was another set of moving moose antlers.

The two bulls were feeding in a valley a mile across the river from us. We had now seen five different bull moose. Brooks’ sourdough friend hadn’t exaggerated when he told Jim the little valley was grand moose country.

The two bulls walked into an opening. Both were big. Antlers weren’t in the record class, but each packed a lot of meat, which is what we were after.

Antlers of the larger one flashed like a mirror – his palms were large. The smaller animal had long points but smaller palms. We watched for half an hour, trying to plan a stalk and mentally urging them to cross the river to our side.

“We have to cross the river,” Jim finally said. “Let’s try that spot,” he said, pointing to a stretch of shallows. By now the two bulls were feeding on willows near the river.

The icy water almost reached the tops of our hip boots, but by walking on tiptoes we managed to stay dry. We crawled out through a shallow beaver run and plunged into riverbank willows, which scratched, clawed and tripped. It was impossible to move quietly. Branches scraped our rain gear. Every breaking twig sounded to us like a rifle shot. We crawled, sneaked and fought through 300 yards, and finally climbed a low rise where we could view where the bulls had been. For other moose hunting in montana, see our Montana Moose Hunting page to find out more.

No moose. If the two bulls had remained, they would have been within easy range. We concluded they had moved into a nearby stand of spruce.

“Why don’t you circle to the other side of these spruces. I’ll go straight through when you get into position. Maybe I can drive them to you,” Jim suggested.

He waited while I cut a wide circle around the spruce stand to an open park. I whistled when I was ready, hoping Jim would hear and start through.

Wind gusted, and a sudden shower slashed through the spruces. I stepped closer to the trunk of a sheltering spruce, pulled my rain parka closer and inched hip boots higher.

I heard a muffled shot. I checked the 220-grain cartridge chambered in my .30-06 Model 70 Winchester and rested my thumb on the safety. Tensely, I peered through the rain at the edge of the spruces and into the clearing.

Two or three minutes after the shot, and about 200 yards below me, the two bulls trotted into sight and stopped. While looking over the clearing before continuing, they frequently peered nervously behind. I remained motionless. Clearly, they were trying to escape a menace behind them; I knew that menace had to be Brooks.

About then the rain shower and wind stopped. It was a dream setup. The two bulls, trotting single file across a clearing, would pass within 100 yards. I flicked the safety off.

A shot rang out. Jim, out of my sight, had shot at one of the bulls. Another shot came and the animal collapsed.

The remaining bull, seemingly as big as a circus elephant, was now as close to me as he would get. I centered the bead of the front sight in the rear peep and held just below his ear and touched her off. He dropped, kicking.

My eyes were glued to the fallen moose as I worked the bolt and trotted to him, half expecting him to get up. Jim approached the bull he had shot. We reached the two animals at the same time. Both were dead. They had fallen about 65 feet apart. We looked at each other and grinned.

“We sure played that one right.”

“And how!”

After looking the animals over and gloating a bit, Jim groaned, “Boy, we’ve really stuck our necks out.” We were three hours from camp and without a flashlight. It would soon be dark, and we had two big moose to skin, gut and quarter. Based on the weight of the meat we later froze, live weight of the bigger bull was at least 1,200 pounds, while the smaller one weighed about 1,000 pounds.

I heard Jim cussing as he worked on his bull. I had similar problems. We couldn’t turn either moose over, lift as we would on their legs. After skinning, we had to remove the top hams and shoulders before we could get at the insides.

Dressing a moose is big-time: A moose liver weighs about 25 pounds; the heart is the size of a football. The rest of the innards are on the same scale.

Even after the plumbing and shoulders and hams on one side were removed, it was all we could do, working together, to flip the carcasses.

I finished dressing my bull in the dark and held the stub of a candle so Jim could remove the last ham from his moose. In a couple of hours, meat from the animals was lying on mats of willow we had cut. Cooling and drying air could circulate on all sides.

We headed for camp. We had hunted since five that morning and eaten our last sandwich and candy bars at noon. We were tired and sticky with moose blood. The overcast night was, simply, black. To see Jim I had to crouch and skyline him. Rain occasionally poured out of the black sky. We stumbled and fell, fought through willow draws, bumped into logs, splashed through ponds.

I almost stepped on a ptarmigan; it leaped into the air shrieking alarm and with wings clattering. Startled, and thinking “bear,” I automatically yank-slammed my rifle bolt, then grinned when I realized it wasn’t.

Without our luminous-dial compass we might have floundered around all night. As it was we were lucky to find camp near midnight. We lit a fire, gobbled food and thankfully crawled into sleeping bags.

We brushed out a rough trail from the kill site to the river and built a cache with a visqueen cover. For the next three days, we packed moose meat to where we could reach it with the canoe. The hams of the biggest bull weighed 135 pounds (weighed later at home). We groaned under the loads, as did our wood-frame Trapper Nelson packboards – then the most popular brand in Alaska.

Once the meat had a solid crust, we knew it would keep, so we played. We caught and released dozens of grayling from the ginclear water. With Jim’s Remington 28-gauge semiautomatic, we hunted ptarmigan, taking turns at shooting the plentiful birds. They had started to turn winter white; the darkbodied white-winged birds made wonderful targets.

I won the toss for first shot. A few hundred yards from camp, with Jim at heel, I eased into a stand of willows where we had seen birds. Two flushed, close, and I dropped one in a cloud of feathers and winged the other. A third shot stopped it as it started to run.

“Okay, Brooks. That’s a double. Match that,” I challenged. He did. We each took home a dozen ptarmigan – prime eating.

From the bluff above camp, we saw caribou nearby – but we had all the meat we could safely handle.

During the three Septembers we hunted in and around the valley, we scored at least one moose every trip. On one visit I had already killed a moose and had it in my freezer, so we hunted to fill Jim’s need. He killed a nice bull at the edge of the Clear Delta – no backpacking involved. We loaded the meat directly into our canoe.

With that meat safely cached, we headed for the bluff, again with Jim’s 28-gauge Remington, planning another turnabout ptarmigan hunt.

We carried one rifle – just in case. It is grizzly country – as well as caribou.

Before starting through the willows to kick up ptarmigan, we glassed the area. Something light colored with hints of red caught my eye. It moved. Caribou antlers.

We climbed a nearby knoll and saw it was a young bull, his neck just beginning to turn white, and with just-cleaned antlers with some clinging bloody velvet. He was bedded for a midday rest, as caribou often do.

Jim tossed a coin. “Heads,” I called.

“He’s yours,” Jim said.

The stalk was easy. There were plenty of head-high willows, and the ground was soft from recent rain. I quietly walked to within 100 yards, lay prone and put a bullet into the animal’s chest. His head dropped and he didn’t move.

I packed the front half, Jim the rear. The 150 pounds of prime caribou meat, added to the small bull moose I had frozen, made for an easy winter.

Almost incredibly, next day, when we returned to again try for ptarmigan, we spotted that caribou’s twin, also taking a midday nap, and Jim easily bagged him. That valley was magic, at least for us. We never did get a ptarmigan hunt on that visit to our secret valley.

Heading home in 1953 from our first visit, we risked all and loaded meat from both bulls, plus our gear, into the 19-foot Grumman, and with inches of freeboard, made it to our pickup in one trip.

The only meat we lost was a handful camp robbers (gray jays) swiped from the cached meat. Between us we froze for winter use more than a half-ton of prime moose meat.

Soon after our third pilgrimage to the valley, I resigned my professorship and moved to the Kenai Peninsula to make my living as a writer – a goal I eventually achieved. Jim earned two wildlife degrees and had a spectacular career in Alaska as a wildlife researcher and manager for both the state and the federal governments.

Today our valley is no secret. Many years ago the Clear Delta was designated a National Wild and Scenic River. When we first hunted there, Alaska’s population was 153,000; today it is 650,000. Now, dozens, if not hundreds, of outdoor lovers – including hunters – annually float through that lovely valley in canoes, kayaks and inflatables. Upstream from where we hunted, signs warn of rapids; portages are marked. If you are wanting to hunt black bear in Montana, you’d might see our Montana Black Bear Hunting page to find out more.

Neither Brooks nor I (we still hunt together – mostly birds now) have ever gone back. I don’t think we will. We prefer to remember it as it was – our “secret valley,” an Eden hunted by just the two of us.

By Jim Rearden

This article and many more like it can be found by Successful Hunter Magazine. Visit them at www.successfulhunter.com