Last Pictures

 

One last post on our South End hunting trip.  These are the pictures that did not fit into any of the other posts.  Pretty pictures that I felt compelled to put on the blog.  Mostly I notice the pictures feature the De Havilland Beaver floatplane that we used to get into the field.  Over the years I have spent a lot of time in that plane.  That plane is older than me too,

The Beaver can carry 1500 pounds which makes it a good one for remote deer hunts.  All our gear and us weighed about 1000 pounds - so we had room for the weight of 5 deer to bring home.

Patrick

Aiaktalik village site - once the largest village on Kodiak

Another view of Aiatalik Village - you can see the old house depressions on the left along the beach

Fall Colors

 

Kodiak is at about peak fall colors.  All the fireweed is red, the cottonwood trees are yellow, and the grass on the mountainsides is golden.  Every few days I have been hiking up to the lake on the shoulder of Pyramid with the dogs.  They love the little lake there and I generally throw a stick out into the water for them to chase.

Yesterday Stuey and his friend Gabe joined me, and they wanted to go to the very top of the mountain.  So rather than a quick turn around at the lake - I took the dogs all the way up to the shoulder of the mountain while Stuey and Gabe went to the top.

Patrick

Stuey and Gabe climbing to the top

the dogs LOVE water

chasing sticks

Stuey finishing in a relay race earlier this September

Termination dust 2024

 

Last Wednesday night it rained and Thursday morning I noticed that there was new snow on the mountain tops.  Termination dust! The first snow of the new year and a sign that winter is on its way.

I climbed up Pyramid and near the top it started to snow.  Nothing was sticking on the ground but there was snow all around in the air.  It made me very happy.  Winter is coming!

Patrick

The Harvest

The whole point to our South End hunting trip was to bring meat back for the freezer.  And in this regard we were wildly successful.  We harvested 5 fat deer and ended up with over 200 pounds of packaged meat in the freezer.  That is a lot of meat, and it took almost 2 days to cut up and package all the meat.

The deer where we went were all big and they were certainly abundant, but they did not have big antlers.  In years past we have been places where the deer had bigger antlers.  What was amazing about where we were this year is that the deer were so easy to find and were practically tame.  I do not think anyone had ever hunted them before.

Patrick
 

Camping on the beach

 

On this last trip, we had a difficult time finding a protected spot to set up our teepee.  We knew it was supposed to blow 50 mph out of the west and so we needed to find a good spot that faced east.  The only spot we could find was on the lakeshore, and even that spot was not quite big enough.  So we had to move same sand and gravel to flatten the spot and extend it out a bit into the water.  We even built a little wall on the outside to protect our teepee platform from waves.  

At first Mike and I were skeptical of camping on the beach.  But Ray informed us that they have to do this a lot on Kayak trips to Prince William Sound.   And so we camped on the sandy beach.  It turned out to be a good call because we did get some severe west winds and it was a protected spot.  Good thing we did not get a wind storm out of the East!

Camping on the sand was a little challenging.  It was difficult to keep sand out of our gear.  I used my pad and packs as table and even re purposed the plastic packaging from some our Safeway wood to use as a small gear tarp.  The biggest challenge was keeping the grit out of the food.

But it all worked out and in the end I kind of liked the spot.  Camping on a sandy beach is not too bad after all.

Patrick