Our third hunting day found us headed in yet another direction. This time, straight up to the high country or "sheep country" as we liked to think of it. Unlike the first couple days, we were now headed up a drainage that runs to the Johnson since we are seeing little sign on the Johnson River itself. After we broke 3000 feet we began to see some older bear sign. Not enough to get us excited but at least it was something.

They're cute, but don't get too close!

We trudged through the snow until we broke above timberline and to nearly 5000 feet. We took some pictures of a porcupine, which was less excited about us than we were about him, and then made the last big push to high country. On the way we spotted a distant object that looked like a bear but it was too far to tell, we would get a closer look from the high peaks.

View a panoramic video of the area we are glassing (900k)

It was cold. The wind was whipping across the steep slopes below us and some clouds began to appear on the horizon. We ridge-ran the top of the mountains until we were at the peak. Once there, we set up to glass for as long as we could stand the cold. The distant objects turned out to be nothing. From here we could clearly view the plateau, which we hoped would hold the caribou. But the snow was still very deep across the flat plain and the caribou were not there. After a couple of hours a snow storm moved in, killing our visibility and forcing us to move down into the trees and back to the plane camp. On our way back we found an old squirrel dig made by a grizzly. We had hoped to find fresh digs but even the squirrels were hard to spot.

Stan checks out a hole made by a grizzly digging up a squirrel

Now going on our fourth day of hunting with no real bear sign - Stan and I are becoming concerned that the bear population is not as high as we had hoped.

 

Grizzly Life in springtime Grizzlies, like most bear, hibernate during the winter. In Alaska they will typically emerge by April 15th and for the first few weeks they will stick close to their dens. They then begin searching for food. In mountainous regions they will comb the high, steep, crags looking for winter-killed sheep or digging up squirrels. In salmon stream areas, they will try to find areas where spawning salmon carcasses have become frozen into the ice. Bears will also feed on blueberries that were covered over with snow and frozen. But the mainstay of their diet is digging up roots like pea-vine, eating buds off trees and eating fresh grasses that emerge during the long daylight hours of springtime. Because a bear has to search for food, they are normally not concentrated in one single area like in the fall, when food is abundant and they are busy packing on the pounds for winter.