DarkSiths Cariboiu Adventure

[Darksith]

We were up around 7, it wasn't a great sleep for either of us. Those emergency bivy sacks might keep the wind and ground wetness off of you, but they trap in the moisture from your body/breath. They are not very comfortable to sleep in, I will probably rethink a thing or 2 in regards to survival equipment I pack on day trips that could turn into overnighters. I woke up as the sun rose, had my triple shot of coffee in the jetboil and a cliff bar. We broke down our mini camp and loaded up the first round of meat. The pack out was uneventful, we shuttled the first load about 3km leaving us about 2.5 for the final push to camp, went back for the second load which included the antlers and cape. For some reason I can't seem to get the meat shelf to work on my kifaru pack. Ive tried numerous times, the cavern I believe is the model, I end up just putting the meat inside with a garbage bag if I have 1. For more than half the pack the head and cape were sitting off kilter, it was annoying but I didn't bother to stop and fix it for a few km's.

We kept using this pine tree as a reference point. It must be one of the only pine tree's for tens or hundreds of kilometres, how it managed to get there makes you wonder...hawk eats squirrel then flies and drops seed from squirrel?


On our way we took a break on a nice hillside and I found a decent crop of wild blueberries. Its nice to forage a few wild berries and enjoy another little thing that one finds along these adventures.


We pushed past our first lay down spot as this was the heavier of the 2 loads and got into camp around 6pm. We ate a nice dinner of Smokies and rehydrate hashbrowns, had our 2nd celebratory beverage of the trip (we decided that any day we brought meat back to camp we would celebrate and have a beer, we each only brought in a 6 pack for the 10 day adventure) and hit the sack. I took a few minutes to catch up on my trip journal that night, the last few days had been a bit hectic, but in such a good way lol.

[Darksith]

We had planned to sleep in a bit, I was up at 7. I fried up some left over hashbrowns and threw in our last jalapeno smokey. Then I asked Jamie if he wanted some which got him out of his tent. We refilled our water, did a few small chores then headed out. A quick stop at the meat pole to hang our loads from the day before then off to get the rest of our caribou. We were robbed! Something got at one of our bags of meat while we were gone for the 2 days! Tore the bottom out of it and the whole bag was empty. Of course it was the tenderloins, back straps, ribs and other trimmings. I saw so mad, I did a rib roll on the moose where you cut the rib and flank meat out as 1 whole piece and then when you cook it you add spices and what not where the ribs were and you roll it up and roast it. Not sure where I saw that, some hunting show, but I was pretty excited to try that cut. Totally bummed we raised everything up as high as we could, that will teach us to use someone else's half ass meat pole I guess. Hopefully the rest stays safe. Off we went to get the final load of caribou.
We hiked for an hour and made it to our meat cache, bumped some ptarmigan on our way, they are so pretty when they start to change colours.


Our meat hadn't been touched thankfully but for some reason we had decided the day before this was the lighter load, well I guess it may have been but it was still dang heavy! In my mind this was just going to be an unnoticeable 20lbs lol...nope, not sure why we thought 2/3 of a caribou was going to be unnoticeable in our packs haha. Oh well we loaded up headed back to camp. Took a few quick rests and 1 break at the half way point. No need to push it, today was our day off.

Jamie bringing my pack the final 20' from shore to boat

Once back to camp Jamie went for a sit on some high ground, I decided to give fishing a shot. I had some decent Intel but ultimately it was just too windy so I headed back to camp, caped out the caribou skull and waited for Jamie to call his water taxi. It was starting to get dark and I was wondering where the heck Jamie's text was, so I ended up shooting him a message then all of his texts popped up. He was down at the water waiting for me for the last 35 minutes. On route to picking him up with the boat of course I ran out of gas, so he had to wait a few extra minutes...we ate dinner, had another beverages since we had brought more meat back to camp that day and called it a night.

[Knute]

What a great read!

Thanks for posting up and congrats on a successful hunt/adventure.

[Darksith]

Sept 9
We woke up and made a plan to head south. We would hunt moose again mainly, try our hand at fishing and test our skills duck hunting. We boated to the south knob that we spotted our moose on Day 2 from, hiked up and glassed around for a bit but didn't spot any animals so we continued on south. We rigged up a tree branch to tilt the outboard so it would be higher up in the water column to avoid running our prop into any rocks as we were told it was going to get super shallow. Once we got into the channel between the 2 larger bodies of water there were ducks everywhere. Thousands of them. We cut the motor and let the wind push us, padding when needed. We were in the middle of their flyway. We took turns shooting and decided 5 was enough for the next few days and the responsible thing to do would be to stop so no animal was wasted. Neither of us had ever really been duck hunting so it was super fun. We will come back and take a few more closer to our departure day to being home maybe.


We headed further south looking for a spot to glass from for moose again but they were few and far between. We decided a small hill behind us was our best option so we turned around. I pulled out a fishing rod and made a few casts as we putted towards the hill. Fish on! It was a dandy, an 18-20" Grayling. Then I handed the rod to Jamie, hes not much of a fisherman but he managed to figure it out and make a cast. Fish on again! This could be fun! The next thing we know we've tied to boat to a big rock, Jamie's fishing from on top of the rock and I'm in the boat with my flyrod. We stopped counting after about 20 fish each, 8 out of 10 casts you would catch a fish and we basically got tired of releasing fish, plus this was a hunting trip lol so we headed up to the hilltop. That was a hoot, we always bring in a couple fishing rods, last year we had a fishing derby on another lake that apparently had no fish in it we learned after the fact haha. We kept the first fish we each caught and let everything else go. The menu was set for the next few days. We got up to the hilltop, had some lunch, debated trying to start a fire and cook something but the wood is seriously lacking so we just had soup in our jet boils. I had a nap and waited for the evening hunt to begin.
We didn't see a thing that day but it was still a great day that I will always remember. We went back to camp at dark, filleted the 2 fish and breasted out the ducks. Sea n sky we called it, seared duck breast with bacon and allspice on garlic toast with lemon pepper Butter fried fish as an appy. Does it get much better than this? We stuff ourselves and went to bed, gonna go hard tomorrow for a 3rd animal.

[Darksith]

The plan was to split up today. I would go high up on the side of the mountain and Jamie was heading to the opposite side of the lake. It's amazing how little game is actually around or maybe just making themselves visible? It's been a little windy the last few days, we haven't spread our scent all over the place mindlessly hiking, and we saw way more game day 2 when we went high than we have been seeing the rest of the trip, even though we've punched 2 tags.


I think between the weather warming up and the wind it's just kept the animals on lock down. The caribou simply haven't started moving yet much in regards to migration and the rutt and moose are staying in the timber our of the warm and wind I suspect. Jamie was coming back from his walk about when I picked him up in my binos about 3km away. That morning when we woke up, smoke had blown into our valley. It was actually quite thick so it really made glassing shitty for me. I could hardly tell a cow bou from a bull at several Km's away.

Shortly after I spotted a caribou to the south of him. I sent him a coordinate and he started moving in that direction. It was about 1km away from him. I couldn't confirm if it was a small bull or a cow so Jamie went to get eyes on it. I thought the animal ducked into some tress to bed down as it was approaching noon. Jamie snuck into the area but couldn't locate the animal. I told him to have a seat and I would let him know when I picked it up again. A few hours later I spotted 2 more bou off to Jamie's western flank. He picked them up as I was notifying him. A cow calf. He continued to move through the area following them in case something else moved into them, but then they bedded down again so Jamie tucked himself into some shade again. I picked up another animal and shot him a GPS of its approx location. He asked again where it was and I told him about to step into the meadow right in front of him. Sure enough it was another cow and was 100 yards in front of Jamie. All day those were the only 3 animals I picked up from my overwatch location. I could see for several km's 180 degress and there simply wasn't anything moving. With the heat and lack of animals we decided to request extraction a day early, the airbase told us they could maybe fit us in the following afternoon/evening.

[Darksith]

Sept 11

We decided to sleep in since we weren't getting picked up until later that afternoon. When I woke up at 745 I checked my phone. The plane was coming at 10am! OMG, I hollered at Jamie and the scramble was on. We managed to get camp packed up and down to the boat in an hour. I try to avoid these types of hectic situations that we felt due to the flight being bumped up and us sleeping in, but sometimes you just have to get through it and we did. It was blowing hard that morning, the lake was the roughest we had seen the whole trip, but we knew the SS Meat Hauler wouldn't have any problems. We loaded up the boat, pointed the nose into the wind and took all of camp minus the racks and our rifles to the beach the plane will pick us up at. 30 minutes later we were unloaded and going back for the last trip. We checked the time, 30 minutes until anticipated arrival time, we were just gonna make it. We decided to get the meat first then we would put the racks and guns on top of that. We loaded up the meat, we could hear the plane coming in and we pushed off to go get the guns. The engine revved then there was a pop and although the motor didn't stop we had lost all power. Wtf! We shut it down, did a quick investigation then hauled the outboard into the boat to investigate further. We tried to pull the cotter pin from the prop but it was stuck. "Where are the tools?" Jamie asked, "on the beach with camp" I replied. We took a pocket knife and tried to pry it out, that didn't work. We took the guts out of some para cord and fed the strands through the loop and twisted them then tied them to the knife to pull it out, that didn't work. Meanwhile the plane just landed, we are on the downwind side of the lake with 1 foot of chop and a moose and caribou in the boat. What do we do, the only thing left we could do...we grabbed the paddles, first we had to get across the bay to get our guns and the racks, now we had about a 1km paddle upwind in brutal conditions with a heavy boat...well we paddled hard for 10 minutes and had to turn the boat towards shore or we were going to be right back where we started. We ended up back at the meat pole location. We emailed the airbase and told them of our problems then we did the only thing left available to us. We started to tow the boat by hand around the shoreline. There were 2 large bays between us and the plane. We got to the point of the first bay and I said let's try and paddle across. Worst case scenario it blows us into the bay which we would have to walk around anyway. It took a lot of effort, and we tried to go into the wind to cut into the second bay but eventually the wind was just too strong and we had to turn towards shore again or lose any progress we had made. We got to shore and we repeated, pushing, dragging or paddling the boat. We finally made it! Just when we thought our adventure was over things take a twist and chaos ensues lol. The plane was waiting for us for almost 2 hours, the pilot had loaded up all our gear while he waited. We had some good laughs with him once we got there finally and packed up the boat and loaded it as well as the meat onto the plane. What was supposed to be an easy uneventful day turned into anything but, but ultimately it was a really fun successful trip even if we didn't complete the trifecta that we were hoping for.






I'd like to thank a few guys from HBC for giving me some tips about the lake, and to all the other guys that reached out trying to help. Planning is a huge part of these types of adventures and its a lot of fun as well I find, so having more knowledge even if its not used bc things are different once your boots hit the ground is always super appreciated.

If you haven't tried Freshtrek Dehydrated meals, I suggest you do. I formerly used Peak Refuel but Freshtrek is made locally here in BC (Burns Lake) and sources all its ingredients from BC producers.

Also I encourage everyone to get involved in a local conservation group or club (rod and gun or WSSBC, Hunters for BC etc). We need more people to get involved which forces politicians to pay attention to us (hunters) and the wild spaces we all love so much. Without action we will lose more and more so please get involved. Thanks for taking the time, I enjoyed sharing this adventure. Next is a moose LEH the kids got in 2 weeks so hopefully we have some more to share soon!

This story was inspired by BigBoar's Story Telling, he was great at it.

[fogrady]

A good story. Thank you.

[Trekker]

Right on, looks like you guys had a great trip. Thanks for taking us along.

[Livewire322]

Thanks for the story and photos! It is great to see some legit hunting content flowing in from the early season

[Husky7mm]

The story and the photos, a real treat. Thanks for the contribution and congratulations.