AK Jeff

joshw,

Going all the way to Prudhoe doesn't decrease your odds of seeing people. People camp where the caribou tend to be. If they're just over Atigun Pass, then that's where the circus will be. If the 'bou are on the coast then you'll see a ton of people waiting just south of the closed area in anticipation of them coming south. Where I saw the 40-odd camps last fall was just south of Prudhoe a few miles. Even though that area is huge and the caribou aren't all in the same group, the Central Arctic Herd tends to be all in the same general area at a given time. If they're herded up near a small area of the road then the hundreds of hunters that are up there end up bottlenecked in the same area. It's just a case of feast or famine and if it's a feast, then there's going to be a bunch of other people at the dinner table.

kybuck,

The Ivishak is a popular river to fly into and then float out of. It dumps into the Sagavanirktok (Sag) and then ends up near the Dalton Hwy. Problem is people can take jet and air boats up the Ivishak so there's usually a whole bunch of camps up there too. There's a ton of rivers up there that you can fly into, but you have to arrange for a pickup flight too. Air taxi costs have gone through the roof with the increased prices of operating in the last few years. You should really get a copy of Larry Bartlett's book Caribou Hunting: A Guide to Alaska's Herds. There's a lot of good info in there.

It'll be interesting to see how the '08 season pans out up there. Last year the herd stuck to the coast for most of the fall and there were a bunch of people that went home empty handed and disappointed. I talked to numerous groups that had been up there for a week or more and had only seen a cow or two. I figured that would cut down on the number of people for this season, but the Board of Game just changed the bag limit to two bulls before Oct. 1 for this season so that's surely to bring more people up. That herd is still plenty strong and not suffering from overharvest at all, but the hunt is just too congested because access is so minimal.

AK Jeff