Diary of a packraft moose hunting trip

on speed-moosing

Content warning: this story is about a moose hunt, and has one pic of a dead moose

Saturday

I pick up the packraft from Garreth, Birch’s brother. Garreth found it in a log jam on the Matanuska river; someone else’s very bad day (hopefully they were ok, just lost their boat) became a free packraft that I could then borrow for this moose hunt. I am eternally grateful for loaner gear from my friends, as each of the Alaska outdoor activities requires ten million pieces of gear and except for when it comes to walking I rarely have more than a few of them. The packraft is an alpacka mule; the five of us will be hiking in to a moosey drainage on Ahtna land in the foothills of the Alaska range and then packrafting out with the moose (if we get one), so each of us needs to bring a packraft large enough for us, our gear and 100 to 200 lbs of moose pieces. The river is like class two plus? Which is good because I’m not much of a whitewater person. The forecast, like the last two years I’ve done this hunt, is lowkey miserable; 45 degrees and raining much of the time, but the fall vibes will be beautiful; the tundra turning yellow and red, the light long, the nights crisp.

I pick up some aquaseal for the holes in the floor of the boat. I lay the dusty boat out on my kitchen floor and paint the stuff on. I’ve never patched a boat before and I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I did watch a youtube video. As far as the tubes holding air, Garreth said he inflated the boat and it was fine, so fingers crossed that it floats. I try to remember what else to bring on this trip- packraft hunting in wet Alaskan fall is different enough from backpacking that I don’t quite have my gear figured out yet, and every year I think to myself “next year I’ll bring such and such” and then by the time the trip rolls around again I’ve forgotten. My pack is much heavier than what I take backpacking- it’s a huge drybag strapped to a pack frame that I’ll use for packing moose pieces to the creek, and inside the drybag is my boat, extra layers, waders, hand warmers, dishwashing gloves to wear over my fleece gloves, game bags, my knife and sharpener, straps and paracord, trash contractor bags, binoculars, plus my usual backpacking gear and four days of food. I’ll be one of the only ones without a rifle- I’m not confident enough at shooting yet to bring one- and that makes my pack lighter, but it’s still heavy enough that I wear boots, which is a huge bummer because once they get wet they’ll stay wet the entire time, and we’ll be walking through knee-deep bog on occasion so they’ll definitely get wet. Next year I might wear trail runners with mids instead- ankle support for the super heavy pack but still able to dry a bit overnight, maybe.

I end up painting aquaseal on twelve pinholes in the floor of the boat- as I work I imagine the boat stuffed in the logjam, being battered by the river day after day. It’s cool how durable these things are.

In the evening I drop the dogs off at my friend Holly’s house, who will be watching them. Quito is in love with Holly currently, and does his “love scream” when we arrive- an ear-shattering peel that is both wonderful and horrifying. Back at home, the house feels depressingly empty- no dogs, and my housemate is in the Brooks range for a month- and I feel melancholy while I gather the last bits of my gear together. My alarm is set for 5 am so of course I stay up until midnight looking at tiktok, because what’s the first day of a trip if you’re not blearily tired, stumbling through the brush in sweet anticipation of collapsing into your sleeping bag that night.

Sunday

When I wake I drink an expired canned oat milk latte that I’ve been keeping, apparently a little too long, for an occasion such as this, and then drive in the dark rain to pick up my friend SJ, who will be riding with me to Birch’s place an hour outside of town, and then we’ll all pile in his car for the remaining 5 hours drive to the hunting spot. The day dawns, heavy and wet and grey, rain thrumming on the windshield, and we eat dark chocolate and pepperoni that Birch had made from a black bear he got a few weeks ago. I dropped by for a few hours to help with the bear processing when it was going on and learned that I maybe have an aversion to eating bear- as I sat at the counter in Birch’s cabin, trimming blood and hair from hunks of greasy white fat, my brain was screaming “this is not food this is people! This is not food this is people!” and the thought of eating the fat made my stomach turn. It’s so random, what we see as food vs. not food, how our selective empathy, as living beings, helps us navigate this world in which we kill other beings in order to survive, and in the end we are eaten too. On one had, what a joy, to eat and be eaten, to be recycled along with all other life, forever and ever, everything that has ever lived and ever will live being broken down and remade, over and over. How cool! On the other hand, damn bears kinda seem like people, and that makes it hard to eat them? Like not “us” people, but like their own kind of people? I feel the same way about anything doglike, and anything catlike. Meaning-making can be so random! I eat you, you eat me, forever and ever. There is no morality, only recycling, and this brief flash of suffering and ecstasy we call life.

I eat half a bear pepperoni stick in the car, though, because I want to want to eat black bears. In Alaska it just makes sense- there are great quantities of them (but like all other species their populations and the hunting of them is carefully managed, don’t worry) and since not as many people want to eat them, they can be a lot easier to get than a caribou or a moose. The pepperoni tastes good, but I can’t finish the stick. I don’t think I can eat bear. There’s not any logic to it, but I just can’t. (I did, however, render some bear fat that Birch gave me and I’m going to make soap from it. I might not be able to eat people, but I can wash with people!)

At the gas station in Cantwell I eye the mozzarella sticks in the hot case- I’m not hungry enough for those at the moment but I imagine myself here post-trip, after spending days packing moose pieces in the cold rain. “I’m coming back for you,” I whisper to the fried cheese, and file the smell away in my brain as comfort for the coming days. Speaking of smells, ever since I got a mysterious, flu-like illness at fish camp this summer (Mickey got it too, and we didn’t have any covid tests) I’ve been imagining the smell of cigarette smoke- a few times a day, and more often when I’m tired. At first I thought it was real- my neighbors smoking on their porch maybe, and the smell drifting in the open window. But then I smelled it when the windows were closed, and in the car, and then on a couple of backpacking trips, while pushing through head-high fireweed or lying in the sleeping bag at night on the pristine tundra, miles from anything, my backpacking partner asleep and not a smoker anyway. Google told me that this is a common thing post-covid, hallucinating a bad smell, but it can also happen just from sinus issues or, somewhat vaguely, from “aging”. Well, I am “aging.” Probably though it’s from Covid. I have a few theories about the future. They’re somewhat depressing. I think that we’re all going to end up with permanent issues from covid, every single one of us. And also that in five years we’ll all have cancer. Oh and Phoenix will be a ghost town.

We eat, and then we get eaten.

This morning, in the car with SJ and Birch, rattling down this potholed road in the rain, the smell of cigarettes is thick- like someone chain-smoked in this car. I know it’s not real, I just didn’t get much sleep last night. Probably tomorrow, after a good nights’ sleep in my tent, my brain will fabricate much less smoke smell. Outside the mountains are wreathed in low clouds and the brush is a vibrant red. I mentally go over my gear again, wondering if I forgot anything. Do I have enough layers to always have something dry to wear, even if it rains all day every day, and the damp creeps through everything, as damp is wont to do? Maybe. Each year I bring a few more layers on this trip, and it never feels like enough.

This trip, which I feel so grateful to be on, is only possible because of the effort that everyone involved has put into it, and particularly Birch- everyone on the trip (except me) is an experienced hunter but Birch, aside from being a life-long Alaskan hunter, is also really good at coordinating groups, and so generous with his time and energy in that regard. Also we’re using his any-bull tag on this hunt, which he’s able to get because of how long he’s been hunting in Alaska, and that will make it potentially much easier for us to get a moose than if we had just a general hunt tag, which is much more restrictive.

We reach the pullout next to the river at midday and meet Nathan and Anna there- Nathan is Birch’s brother and Anna is his partner, and they’ve driven down from Fairbanks. The five of us stand in the cold rain, stuffing gear into the drybags that we’ll strap to our packframes, and once the drybags are on our packframes we strap rolled boats onto that, and paddles, and then Anna, Nathan and Birch all have rifles too, and then we’re awkwardly balancing the whole mess on our backs, and taking our first steps into the willow brush off the road, which is soaked in rainwater and immediately drenches us. We follow bits of animal trails as we wend our way north into the valley, the sound of wet drawf birch swishing on rainpants a sort of ASMR. I occasionally forget that you’re supposed to be stealthy while hunting and start up a conversation, and someone good-naturedly shushes me. Hunting is so different from backpacking, in so many ways. Hunters and backpackers conceptualize the outdoors so differently- even though they might go out on the same bit of land, the stories they tell themselves about that land and the way they move through it is so different it’s as if they exist in two entirely separate worlds. For example, when making one’s way through dense brush in Alaska as a backpacker, you often make as much noise as possible, so you don’t surprise a brown bear. On my recent trip in the Brooks Range, we sang whenever we were in willow brush- loudly, hilariously, and off key (on my part)- whatever cringe songs we could think of, whatever happened to pop into our heads. Now here I am, wandering through the brush in an area with a really high density of brown bears, much more so than in the Brooks Range, and we’re being as quiet as we can, essentially sneaking through the willows. Another example- when I’m backpacking in Alaska I carry an ursack, a special food bag that bears can’t get into. I cook dinner away from my tent, and when it’s time for bed I put all my food in the ursack and stash that on the tundra a distance away from my tent. The first time I came on this hunt, two years ago, I asked Birch if he was bringing an ursack.

“What’s an ursack?” he said.

On that hunt, I was surprised to discover that I was the only person carrying bear spray. Field dressing and packing the moose left us covered in blood- our hands, our clothes, our shoes, our packs, and there was no way to clean anything. At night we arranged the moose pieces in their bloody game bags on the gravel bar in front of our tents, out in the open. It was cold so we cooked in our vestibules. We slept with our food. We saw three brown bears on that hunt- it was out in the open and they ran away from us, as brown bears out in the open usually do once they realize you’re human. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the two different ways of conceptualizing danger in nature, necessarily, but I do think that hunters have too much confidence in their guns- what good is a rifle going to do if you encounter a brown bear in dense brush? In my experience and the stories I’ve heard from friends, sketchy bear encounters happen extremely fast, because they usually happen in close quarters- if a bear decides to attack you, you have about one second to respond. I carry my bear spray in a way that I can get to it in one second- on my hipbelt or, when I’m trail running, in my hand. I don’t think that one second is enough time to finagle a rifle, and so if I could change one thing about the way hunters in Alaska conceptualize the outdoors, I would have everyone carry bearspray too. All the data shows that bearspray works- I have never heard of it not working- and not only that, since the bear lives, it helps teach bears to be more afraid of people, which is good for everyone involved.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got everyone’s back,” I say to my gun-toting friends, as I pat the bearspray on my hip belt. They laugh at this.

As we hike we stop on occasion to collapse on the soft tundra and eat rain-soaked crowberries while Birch tirelessly glasses the distant slopes with his binoculars. We can’t stop for long though because we’re soaked and if we’re not moving the cold creeps in as cold, when one is damp, is wont to do, so we drag ourselves upright again and stumble forward under our heavy packs. There are stream crossings and my boots are full of icy water but I don’t mind, I am one with this wet, autumnal land. I am swimming through it.

In the evening we reach our campsite, a perfectly flat tundra meadow edged in bog, and pitch our shelters on the reindeer lichen. We are weary in that special way that one is weary after carrying a very heavy pack while also being very wet and cold, and we change into cozy dry things and eat dinner from our sleeping bags as the rain drums on the fabric of our shelters. Birch stays up for a while, glassing from a nearby hilltop, and spots some moose in the distance. Four cows, in an area we’ll pass through tomorrow, en route to our second camp.

“Where there’s cows, there’s bulls,” he says.

I tell him that he’s very hardcore to still be outside in the cold rain and then he and Nathan tell a story of when they were children and their dad had them packing moose quarters over a sketchy rope bridge that stretched above a huge ravine.

“I think I was about twelve,” says Nathan.     

Monday

I get the blissful first-night-in-camp sleep that I was craving- ten hours of it. In the morning my inreach tells me that it’s supposed to stop raining by 8 am and it does- there’s clouds still, but no more rain! We have a leisurely morning, morale buoyed by this wonderful turn of events and then we’re packed up and headed north again, around the bend in the mountains to our second camp. A mile into the day Birch spots a moose on a slope to the west- he is always saying

“There’s a moose!” and I look where he’s pointing but I can not, for the life of me, see anything but willow brush, but then I pull out my binoculars and sure enough there’s a single ear or a bit of a rump, moving among the leaves. That’s another thing I learned from backpacking that is completely opposite of hunting- I don’t want to see animals, and so I don’t look for them. I’ve been trying to unlearn this- my hunter friends are always scanning the land and seeing animals everywhere- but it’s hard. It’s a special muscle in my brain that I’m not used to turning on.

Now we all get out our binoculars to peep this moose that Birch sees.

“It’s a cow.” And then, “there’s a bull!” he whisper-shouts and sure enough, a bit away from the cow is a bull, monching companionably on the brush.

Excitement ensues- is the bull too far away? Maybe not. We all drop our packs. Birch and Anna shoulder their rifles- they’ll attempt to get closer to the bull, see if they can get close enough to take a shot. SJ, Nathan and I will stay with the packs.

I eat snacks and watch through my binocs as Anna and Birch creep up on the moose. Nothing happens for a long time, and then there’s a shot. The bull just… stands there. A second shot. A third. A fourth shot and the bull drops. Later, Birch will tell me that’s what moose do- they often just stand there after they’ve been shot, because they don’t know which direction the threat is coming from, so they don’t know what to do. So you have to shoot them again, because you don’t know if you’ve hit them at all.

We make a waypoint for the random spot in the brush where our packs are and gather a few things to take with us to the kill site. Knives, game bags, pack frames, straps. Snacks and water. When we reach Anna and Birch they’ve already started field dressing the moose- it’s important to get the guts out fast, as you want to cool the meat down and the organs hold a lot of heat. It’s just a medium sized bull, which I’m honestly relieved about- the first time I came on this hike we got a giant bull, and as cool as it was to get that much meat, moving the pieces almost broke me, like some parable about greed or the story about the monkey who wants the banana but then his hand gets stuck trying to get the banana out of the thing it’s in and he refuses to let go of the banana in order to get his hand unstuck, and so he dies. Or when I was test fishing last year and the sockeye were so plentiful they almost swamped our skiff.

Anna and Birch and the reasonably-sized moose

The five of us happily set to work on this reasonably-sized bull that Birch and Anna so skillfully got, under the bright clouded day, nary a raindrop anywhere. Once the bull is field dressed and cut up into eleven 50-75 lb pieces we’ll pack those pieces .7 miles, as the crow flies, through the brush to the river. Once they’re all at the river we’ll retrieve our packs and move those down to the river too, and that will be our launching point for when we packraft out.

“Another successful speed-moosing trip,” I joke, as I help skin the bull, alongside Anna and Nathan, as Birch and SJ carefully remove the organs. I call these trips speed-moosing because we get a moose so dang fast- Birch is so good at spotting them and, because of his any-bull tag, he can get the first one he sees. I’m so grateful for this- just a couple of days is the perfect amount of time to be out in this tempestuous weather. SJ is a nurse in the ICU and she’s naming the parts of the moose as she removes them, holding up the heart and showing us the bits inside-

“These are the heart strings,” she says.

I’m too much of a newb to remember anything she’s saying. This is my fifth moose or caribou I’ve helped field dress and I still couldn’t tell you which organ is the kidney, or how to get the intestines out without cutting them open and getting poop on everything. It’s just so much information, and like anything, it takes a lot of experience to truly begin to absorb it. For now I focus on separating the skin from the fascia without nicking it, or myself, or someone else.

Once a few legs are off Nathan and I begin packing, strapping them to our packframes and heading towards the river. The brush is thick and the moose piece is heavy and there’s a knee-deep slough I have to walk through but .7 miles later I drop the pack gratefully onto a gravel bar, wiped. Back through the brush to the moose, and I pack another piece.

With all of us hard at work like this by 2pm the field dressing is done and all the moose pieces are at the river. I disassociate into my snack bag for a while and then head back to where we left our packs this morning- at which point I find an animal trail that carries me the entire way and that I could’ve been using all day, instead of fighting my way through the brush. How long, I think, does it take us, as human animals, to get to know a bit of land- its humps and meadows, its bogs and choke points and sloughs. To find the easiest ways through, the ways the animals have already found. Half a day, apparently, of walking back and forth.  

Once our stuff is all schlepped to the gravel bar we set up our tents to dry in the sun, which has decided to come out. I finally get to take off my waterlogged boots, which feels incredible. SJ lays in the sun, hat over her face, crocs on her feet. Birch melts a little moose fat in a pan and fries hunks of backstrap for everyone. The sun sinks behind the mountains, their ridges dusted in new white snow.

“I have a surprise,” says Birch. He produces three freeze-dried ice cream sandwiches, for my birthday. It’s the day after tomorrow but since we did speed-moosing we won’t be out here then, so he’s handing them out now.

“Wow!” I say. We eat the ice cream- it’s literal ice cream sandwiches, just freeze dried, so they’re the consistency of meringue. Being on this moose hunting trip is honestly the best birthday I could imagine for myself. Out on this challenging, magical land, doing a hard thing with such skilled and gracious people. I’ve been pretending that the whole thing has been my birthday- eating blueberries, sleeping in my cozy bag, when the rain stopped, getting to take part in field dressing and packing the moose, finding the animal trail, all the chocolate I packed.  

The light is long and the temperature is dropping, and we all retire to our tents.

“Will someone wake me up if there’s northern lights?” says Anna.

“Ooh me too,” I say.

In the night I hear voices and wake to the moon, reflecting off the river and glittering the frozen condensation on my tent. Outside I find SJ and Anna watching a band of green across the northern horizon, an aurora borealis rainbow. Above us there are stars and all around us the clear night sparkles. It’s exciting, all this light reflected in so many different, fantastical ways, and I don’t think I’ll be able to fall back asleep but I curl up into a tight little ball against the cold and of course, I do.  

Tuesday

In the morning it’s drizzling so we dawdle a bit, eating slow breakfast in our tents, waiting for the rain to stop. I eat granola and a gluten-free stroopwaffle and leftover backstrap from the night before. Finally the rain stops and the clouded sky brightens and we blow up our boats. Mine deflates a bit so I rub soap all over it and find a leak in the zipper.

“There’s sand in there,” says Birch. “If you sacrifice your toothbrush you can clean it.”

I do. Now the leak is mostly gone, only a tiny bit left at the end of the zipper.

“A soft boat is fine,” says Birch.

“I mean, it floats,” I say, as I ease it into the river, loaded with all my gear and a couple of moose pieces. I’m wearing every layer I have, because the float out is always the coldest part.

What I like about this river is that at its deepest parts (maybe four feet?) it’s extremely gentle and flat, and when there’s rapids it’s shallow. And we’re just above treeline, so there aren’t any sweepers. It feels like even if I flipped my boat I could probably recover everything, and it would be very difficult to drown. Still I stay right behind someone else at all times, following their lines like a little duckling, because I’m not good at noticing submerged rocks until I’m right on top of them.

We bob along, watching the mountains drift by, flushing ptarmigan, pointing out beaver lodges and the occasional camps of other hunters. We stop every so often so the non self-bailing boats among us can dump their water, and I only have to add air to my boat once. A few hours later we reach the road, my back in terrible pain like it always gets after sitting in a packraft, and help each other haul our meat-laden boats out. We did it!

The rain begins in earnest just as we finish packing everything into the cars. We say goodbye to Anna and Nathan, and Birch, SJ and I bump along the road back to town. The car’s dash says it’s 48 degrees outside, and Birch turns up the AC.

“To keep the meat cool,” he says. I fully get in my sleeping bag and zip it all the way up, at which point I feel so cozy I almost fall asleep. At the Cantwell gas station I rush inside, but there are no mozzarella sticks in the hot case. There are chicken strips that look like they’ve been in there a while, but I buy them anyway.

“These are stale,” I say, in the car.

“Then why are you eating them?” says SJ.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I just really wanted something from the hot case.” SJ bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, and this turns out to have been the superior choice. We pass it around until it’s gone. Happy birthday to me, I think, adding the icecream to the list of nice things that are for my birthday. The yellow of the birch leaves along the highway pop against the sky, which is a hundred shades of grey. That is also for my birthday. It’s evening when we reach Birch’s Dad’s house, and hang the moose pieces in the shed in the last of the light. In two days we’ll return for the long work of processing, which will be hard in a different way. I feel deliriously tired on the drive back to Anchorage. After dropping off SJ I pick up the dogs from Holly’s, and at my house I explode my gear so it can begin to drip-dry and then collapse into bed, falling into the deepest sleep.