WARNING!! Guest Blogger: Alaska Trip

Hello everyone,

I have been given a RARE opportunity to be a guest blogger on our family site here. Will see how it goes and see if I am given this chance again. Hopefully this will be up to snuff and pass committee inspection.

Anyways.... to begin.... at the beginning of Sept, I, Jon (husband of the blog site master and father of the Jacobs 6), my brother Aaron and my father all took a trip to Alaska. The main goal was to shoot a moose (and maybe a bear) as well as have an enjoyable trip since neither of us had ever been to Alaska but had heard of all wonderous stories about the place. Needless to say the trip lived up to all our expectations, we had a great time, I managed to "catch" a moose as they say up there, Aaron really never got a chance to snag the bear he wanted but we all got back safe and sound however not without some added adventure. I have attached a series of pictures and text that somewhat describe our trip. Please enjoy.

To begin we took a flight into Fairbanks, then had this plane drop us off at a nice little village called Huslia. Nice ride.

View from the airplane ride. Notice all the WATER..... Good thing we have boats waiting for us in Huslia to take us to camp...

This is the boat dock at Huslia where we loaded up and went up river about 2 hours to get to camp or as I would like to say "The Hilton Suites". Notice the head nets on me and Dad. This is where we realized that the best preparation we made was to buy these nets to keep the gnats from driving us crazy.

Our Hilton Suite... Dinners included but the bathroom is down the hall...

Riverside view from our suite...

The first few days we saw a lot of neat country and a few moose. The leaves were just starting to change so it was really stunning views but it was still fairly warm. We would take the boat around the major river and then get out and hike around these open meadows looking for moose.


Another moose. Was still early in the trip so didn't really want to shoot one yet. Saw this guy swimming the river so we went and got a closer look in our boat. Pretty fair swimmers.That's me at camp. Good view of the small bug problem... Mainly just during the middle of the day. Insect repellent did nothing... I think the gnats and mosquitos actually liked it.
Picture of Dad next to the Koyokuk river. Just a little smaller than the Columbia.

BIG wolf track. Saw a couple along the river but never got too close to them.
This is Bullwinkle when we were calling him in. Saw him on Day 5 and decided he was the one. He walked up fairly close to us before he stopped here.This is Bullwinkle about 2 minutes later. After the shot he took off into the river for a swim but didn't make it to the other side. Took all four of us to get him out of the water. Oh Joy..
Finally on dry ground. Now all the work began. They take every piece of meat up there, which is alot.... Most all of it was donated to the locals and I had about 50 lbs shipped back to the states for us. Moose tastes pretty darn good. One of the better game meats we have eaten.


After the hunting was over we took a short trip up a small tributary "The Dokli" to do some fishing for huge arctic grayling. This is our lunch break. Fishing was unreal. That's our guide, Edgar, keeping the fire going. Great guide.
That's Aaron and me as we make our way back down the river. Notice the rifles still. Mainly for bear protection. Ended up we didn't see any big bears (grizzly, etc..) but did see a couple of black bears. Aaron wanted to bring one home but never got a good chance to take one.

Turns out that if a rock gets stuck up into the jet boat motor intake, it will strip the drive shaft and leave you stranded up the creek (so we made some homemade paddles to help speed our trip back down).
Also turns out that 35 miles of paddling takes longer than one day so we had to spend the night along the way back... but we had a tarp and a chain saw (hence gasoline thanks to our awesome guide who was prepared) so we were able to get a big fire going all night to stay warm/dry and keep the big bears away. Dinner consisted of what we didn't eat for lunch which for me was a smashed PBJ and good old SPAM... Yum Yum. I can't say that I sleep all that well on the bumpy wet ground but at least one side of me was warm for a few minutes at a time until I had to roll over. That's me and Dad working on the fire.
Next day got into some northern pike, so took a break from rowing and caught a few.

That's Dad happily rowing. Got back down to the main river the middle of the next day after about 14 total hours of rowing, 35 miles at roughly 2-3 mph per GPS. We were picked up on the main river after we shot three times in the air to signal. Needless to say there is no cell phone service up there and we had the only boat the would make it up the creek so everyone at camp pretty much just had to wait for us to get back. They were a bit worried about us being gone over night but realized stuff happens sometime. They said if we didn't show up by the next day they were going to send in a rescue party. There was one satellite phone at the main camp for the only communcation to town. We were glad to see the camp.. and our cots.
Once we made it all the way back into Huslia we were so excited to take a shower but as you can read, the local facilities were out of gas... The only way in or out was by small plane or by barge which is a 700 miles trip up from Fairbanks. Turns out the barge came the next day (there are only 2-3 barges per year).

We flew out the next day, spent a day in Fairbanks getting acclimated to civilization, then came back home.

That's it.... Hope it wasn't too long.