By Scott Bestul

No, not “buck” as in a dollar. You can’t do much of anything in Alaska for a dollar. But you might be able to save a whole bunch of money chasing trout, salmon, or halibut if you have access to some good whitetail hunting. I know because I’ve done it, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask my friend Greg Brush, owner of EZ Limit Guide Service in Soldotna, AK. That’s him in the photos.

Greg and I met on a bowhunt a few years back, and that’s when I learned he’s nuts about whitetails, which are damned rare near his home. So every fall he travels somewhere in the Lower 48 to chase deer. And to save money, he tries to swap a guided fishing trip in Alaska for a whitetail hunt. [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

The question is not so much what you’ll be hunting as, will you be in bear country? I have hunted caribou in Alaska with a .270, .270 WSM, and 7mm Weatherby Magnum, and all three did fine. Except that, on the hunt where I had the 7mm, I was checked out by a young boar grizzly, who seemed to find the guide, my friend, and me mildly disappointing and wandered away. If he had been a mature boar grizzly, I might have wished for a much bigger rifle.

I’ve known, personally, two guides who had to kill bears (one a brown, the other a grizzly) who were trying to do the same to them. One guide did the job himself with a .416 wildcat. The other guide had a .44 Magnum revolver, and the attack took place very suddenly over the disputed carcass of a caribou. The guide told me that if his client had not stood his ground and shot very quickly and very accurately with a .338, he might not be there to tell me the story. [ Read Full Post ]

By Steven Hill

Lighting struck twice in Texas last season when two hunters each tagged 250-class nontypical bucks. Both deer were contenders for the state record, but when an official Pope and Young scoring panel began reviewing the second rack, things got complicated. So goes the story of a new Texas record...

The Texas deer season was less than an hour old, and A.J. Downs had a 28-point buck on the ground that he’d been watching on his trail camera for a month.

A.J. Downs, 39, with his 28-point nontypical taken from a ground blind shortly after sunrise on opening day of the 2012 Texas season. (Photo courtesy of Texas Big Game Awards).

From the moment he spotted the massive deer in late August, the Conroe, Texas, bowhunter knew it was an outlier. It was a freak unlike anything he’d encountered in the seven or eight years that he and his brother, Quentin, have hunted their lease on a 12,000-acre low-fence cattle ranch in San Jacinto County in east Texas.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Downs told the Athens Review in October, “and I probably never will again. Bucks like this don’t come along very often...anywhere. You can’t manage... [ Read Full Post ]

By CJ Lotz

Any decent hunter knows you never let good venison go to waste. If the grill of your truck happens to meet a deer in the road, once you get through cussing a blue streak, you report the accident and ask officials if you can keep the meat. But nobody TRIES to hit a deer, right? Well…

[ Read Full Post ]

By Peter B. Mathiesen

Three years ago, outdoor writer, photographer, and consummate sportsman Peter Mathiesen left his hometown of St. Louis to start a new life in Alaska. Here’s why he made the move, what everyday life is like, and how it feels to have Denali right outside your window.

There is no telling how many bears walk within a mile of my home. I readily find both black and grizzly sign nearby. Grizzlies seem to want to shy away from the house, although blacks are far more curious.

Two summers ago, at around 9 p.m., I heard a single round discharged from what sounded like a large-caliber gun. My retriever barked once, looked up at me to see if we were going somewhere, and went back to sleep. That sounded close, I thought. Fifteen minutes later, a neighbor knocked on my door. He introduced himself and said, “I understand you’re a hunter. I don’t know what to do with this bear I just shot. Can you lend a hand?” [ Read Full Post ]

By David Draper

Last fall, I was lucky enough to finally fulfill my dream of hunting Sitka blacktail deer on Kodiak Island. The trip was pure Alaska: rough-water beach landings, white-knuckle bush plane rides, brown bear encounters, whale sightings, and mountain vistas so magnificent I won’t even try to describe them here.

And, of course, the food.

You might think it would be hard to eat well on boat with a galley the size of a closet, but with the help of Camp Chef’s Steve McGrath, we dined mighty fine. It didn’t hurt we had access to some incredibly fresh protein, including blacktail deer and tanner crab plucked from the Gulf of Alaska just hours earlier. [ Read Full Post ]