Nushagak Fall

This is my first real post and I've struggled a little with where to begin. I guess purpose is a logical place to start. At 31, most of my friends and family have chosen to leave Rural Alaska while I've come back to stay. We live a different sort of life out here. I've seen a little of what the rest of the world has to offer and quite frankly, I don't care for it. Johanna and I have chosen to raise our family in this very small place living a semi-subsistence lifestyle, filling the freezer with fish and meat, and of course mushing dogs. I'd like to continue to share this lifestyle with those we love and think about often. Others are always welcome of course, but this blog is mainly written for our family and friends in Minnesota, California, Arizona, urban Alaska, and where ever else they may be. There will be plenty of discussion about dogs to come. After all this is the Nushagak Kennels blog. But lets start where the season finds us, just finishing filling the freezer. Enjoy the blog.

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Summers are busy in Bristol Bay, the sockeye salmon capitol of the world. But after the "outside" commercial salmon fishermen and cannery workers have left and we get our towns and villages back to ourselves the real work begins. Families scurry about picking berries in their favorite spots and searching for new ones. All the salmon have been put away and many focus their energies on moose.

Moose are enormous. A big moose will give a family 500+ pounds of red meat. Some couples and small families choose to share a moose. Moose are fun to hunt, but require a huge amount of physical labor once they have been killed. Finding a good moose hunting partner is no small task.

In Koliganek I hunted with my father-in-law Roger most of the time. We got along well and enjoyed our time together. He's a very healthy man in his mid-50's and we didn't have too much trouble handling moose we shot. I flew to Koliganek to hunt with him early in the season this year hoping to give him a hand with his moose. He wound up shooting one a week after I left. He cleaned the entire moose by himself in 5 hours! That's a lot of work! Like I said, he's a very healthy 50 year old. I hadn't found a good moose hunting partner like Roger in Dillingham until this year partly because of the way I prefer to hunt.

Like I said, moose are big and heavy. This leads most local hunters on the Nushagak River to hunt from their boats. I've done plenty of it myself, but it does get boring spending day after day sitting in an open skiff. It just so happens that my co-worker Ryan had some of the same thoughts about moose hunting. We both wanted to get off the river and "call in" a moose. We hiked into some beautiful areas on the lower Nushagak River the last three days of the season. It's amazing what a person sees when they sit quietly in the wilderness. We saw osprey diving for pike, cow moose grazing in a meadow, beaver, mink, and otter swimming in back water sloughs, porcupine waddling by, and a mouse scurried over my boot. Despite the frequent rain showers, we enjoyed ourselves.

We were able to trick one moose and took a few nice pictures of the animal. When Ryan gets them to me I'll post them and talk about how we got the moose and other hunting techniques we employed. But at this point the freezer is stocked for the winter and I'm chomping at the bit to get my dogs in harness for some fall training. Once we finish our pole-shed, I'm going to do just that.