Thorne Bay, Alaska.  Home, finally, once more.  Or as much as that is possible, in this world.  In the words of that favorite old gospel song of mine, this world is not my home, I’m just a passing through. My treasures are laid up, somewhere beyond the blue. The...

Day 13: We slept in. The thermostat said 35-degrees in the cargo trailer and 33-degrees in the tent. Burrrrrrrr! At 6am, our neighbor Mr. Hoot Owl was hooting up a storm. By 7am, the camp robbers (the jays we had been feeding for two weeks) were dancing all around the...

Day 12: Our last great hunt of the season. We know where they are but nobody will go in with us. The area is huge. Gary knows the area but one of the courses we need to take is "uncharted territory" as he stated. We told a few of the other hunters what our plan of...

Day 11: Really cold night last night. Woke up to 37°. By dawn it dropped to 34°. The frost on the ground is thick. It's so cold that the steel of my rifle is like ice on my fingers. I dropped Gary off on an old road parallel to the areas we are hunting. The last fresh...

Day 10: Another cold, foggy, wet morning. Starting off by staging a truck at our exit point and then checking the roads. Our first hunt took us back to yesterday's area only this time we will approach from the upper end, not the lower end. We sat and cow called in a...

Day 9 total and day three of yet another excellent wet morning. Not much fog to speak of. We are going into the place where Gary walked for 2 hours and found the fresh tracks that had just been made. The elk we are looking for has been living in this area for more...

I cannot tell you how many times I have headed out into the field with a friend, new hunter or family member and I hear, “I really wish I could have spent more time practicing shooting first, before the hunt.” This sentence drives me crazy. You are telling me that you...

It's the weekend! Elk are tucked away as far as we know, so we came back to camp to eat lunch and do some chores before the rain starts. Wood is chopped, solar panel charging our equipment, ropes and tarp hung over the meat pole, new latrine dug, showers felt great,...

Day 6: Here is a beautiful snow lake that is just a mud hole now. We glass it (with binoculars) every time we drive by looking to see if a herd has been through it or not. Last time I saw fresh sign moving through it was Monday. Holy cow!! One elk crossed back over in...

Day 5: As soon as the sun comes up, we're going to go check out the tracks I cut yesterday. We need to determine if the elk went up or down, and then decide what we want to do from there. Somebody was target practicing last night just below our camp. Which means we...

Yay! Gary's here. First hike should be a doozy. At least now we have two rigs. We can park one down below and drive up to the very top to cover more ground that way. We split up to make one big huge circle of the area. Gary went downhill; I'm going to track uphill....

It's a virtual heat wave this morning at 41-degrees upon sunup for my elk hunt. Worst walk ever. About a mile hike straight up a red cinder road. You talk about noisy!! I feel like I'm being sent into enemy territory for this elk hunt. A group of hunters have been...