Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Arctic Hunting

My friend Buddy and I went up the Dalton Highway (Haul Road) to hunt caribou last weekend. We did not get anything, but it made for a really good story. The Haul Road is the same one you see on Ice Road Truckers. Its not as bad as they make it out on TV, but I'm not hauling 40 tons of cargo either. Needless to say, it was an interesting trip, and it allowed me to check off some of the things I want to do while in Alaska. The picture below is me standing at the arctic circle. There is a turn off and a little rest area as well as a sign and some information about it.

The following pictures were taken as we went along the road. In some of them you can see the Alaska Pipeline which follows the road all the way to the north coast of Alaska.



There is one mountain pass that goes through the Brooks Range. It is called Atigun Pass. As you can see it was covered in snow and ice. It was very cold up there!!



This was on the other side of the pass. The weather was beautiful except the temperatures. It was around 0 degrees F.

This was around where we stopped to hunt and camp. This was about 112 miles south of the north coast. The temp was around 0 to -2. On the Haul Road, you cannot hunt with a rifle within 5 miles of the road. This meant we had to walk off the road 5 miles before we could shoot any caribou. It was a hard hike! Later that night I saw -18F on my truck thermometer.
This was a sunset we saw on the way back to Anchorage.

2 comments:

McKinney Madness said...

That sunset is to die for!! Looks like you're having the time of your life! Now if you could just get Rach to hunt caribou and moose, you'd be good to go!

Andrea said...

ummm, cold!!!!