Rich LaRocco's Hunting Journal

A customer asked me to recommend a hunt that would give him a good chance of taking an 11-foot brown bear. Here's my answer (1/27/09):

11-foot brown bears are so rare that few brown bear guides or hunters, even serious local hunters, have ever seen one. It's equivalent to a 40-inch mule deer or a 200-inch typical whitetail. And lots more people claim to have seen those than were actually in existence because a 36-inch muley looks monstrous, and so does a heavy-antlered 170-class whitetail. A 10-foot bear is still an exceptional trophy, roughly equivalent to a 30-inch muley or a 350-class bull elk, and most 10-footers that you hear about really aren't. They're usually rounded up from 9'7" or 9'8" or even 9'6", or they take the pelt off the bear, stretch it from nose to tail and call that a 10-footer. And once the hide is tanned, it won't square 10 foot anyway -- unless the hide is wet and mounted on a life-size form. I would suggest booking a spike camp hunt in the most remote part of a refuge I know about and going for a 10-footer but being happy if you end up with one that pushes that mark. That's realistic in this particular refuge, less so on Kodiak Island, which is known more for skull size than body size. The Alaska Peninsula consistently produces the biggest bears, but even there the great majority of hunters go home with a bear between nine and 10 feet square, and most of the top outfitters are extremely expensive.

One of my long-time customers wrote me an email to congratulate me on a successful sheep hunt in Alaska and asked me to describe a physically difficult hunt in remote back country. I thought my readers might enjoy my response as follows (1/25/09):

Yes, this hunt was tough physically, but that's what I like. There's something special about having to work hard to get your game; it makes the whole experience more vivid and memorable and the taking or mere sighting of a magnificent trophy animal more satisfying.

The vertical climbs weren't too bad in Alaska because the elevations where sheep live are low -- usually below 5,000 feet, so there's plenty of oxygen. It's just one foot after (or over) the other, one step at a time. It takes several hours to climb up to the sheep country, and I was telling my friend, the guide, that we should bring our backpacks and tent and just stay up there instead of climbing up and down from the great river valley below. By the end of the trip, he pondered what I had been saying, and he said he agreed with me. So if we ever draw that tag again, I think we'll do the hunt a bit differently, packing all our stuff in 20 to 25 miles, then taking just four or five days worth of food and hiking up into the high country and staying there until we score or run out of food. And then we'll make a quick trip down to resupply.

Someday I would like to do a two or three-week hunt with 14 days or so of actual hunting in order to get the biggest ram in the area. I hope I get that chance before I'm too old to climb and hike the distances required.

The climbing isn't so bad, actually. It's the dense, crisscrossed alder bushes that are difficult. Some people get intimidated and angry by them, while I take them in stride, refusing to fight the brush and branches or to try to bend them out of my way, instead picking myself through and around the many interlocking limbs. But I must admit that climbing and descending through thick alders is a mental and physical challenge even for the toughest of us.

When you're on a difficult hunt like that, you find yourself asking, "Am I having any fun yet?" But then you get home and can't wait to go again.

My daughter Jennifer once asked me, "Of all the many hunts you've been on, which is your favorite?"

I knew what she meant. She wasn't asking me to pick just one single hunt in which I either took or didn't take what I was after; she was asking what sort of hunting experience was my favorite.

My answer: "There's nothing quite as special as riding your own horse on a remote trail, miles and miles from the closest dirt road or man-made structure, bugling back and forth with bull elk in the wilderness. Whether I get my game or not is immaterial; it's the entire experience that is captivating and intoxicating. And right next to that experience is that of finding yourself high on a jagged ridge in Dall sheep country, scanning 360 degrees and seeing absolutely no sign that humans have ever walked the earth, knowing that you and your friend or guide are there among the glaciers and rugged pinnacles alone, prepared to deal with the elements and the terrain, sharing the hunt with grizzlies and wolves, knowing that few people will ever get the chance to visit such a pristine and remote and starkly beautiful place."

You've been out of doors enough to know what I'm saying. It's sad that some people know nothing of the sheer exhilaration of enjoying the wonders that God created for us to enjoy.

My Utah ram fell in almost vertical terrain. His horns were already heavily broomed and broken, but we almost needed mountain climbing gear to reach him safely. No mule could have climbed where we found this magnificent Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep. Click on photo to see larger image.

I had two superb hunts in 2008, a year that surely will be one to remember for decades to come. My Utah bighorn hunt was a wonderful experience also, and I only regret that I have but one chance in a lifetime to do that trip, searching for the animal that the long-ago "Sheep Eater" Indians also hunted in those same desert canyons. The ancient Anasazi and Fremont tribes left evidence of their passing, and it was thrilling to see some of it in the form of rock blinds, rock granaries where they stored their maize, flint and chert chippings below ideal vantage points, petroglyphs and pictographs etched and painted on rock walls varnished by the ages, showing the story of hunts long gone by.

I'm one who appreciate such experiences, the sort of person who points out pretty wildflowers but is equally appreciative of the thorny and prickly plants of the desert, who will take time to smell the wild rose or gaze at the golden eagle soaring on updrafts high above a canyon said by some to be steeper and deeper than the Grand Canyon itself. My son-in-law Brinton and I lay under the stars, the sky unpolluted by the lights of the city or even a town, thinking of the immensity and wonder of the universe and the unfathomable smallness of our own selves, tiny specks of humanity in an infinity of space and time. Did we enjoy every moment? Unquestionably, yes.