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Hindsight 20/20
Posted by dr. brian on Dec 05 2005
I was hunting out of Kotzebue this last fall and made a stupid mistake that I learned from. We had been delayed several days getting into the field, but once there my buddy and I each got two caribou. On the day of our planned pickup by the air service, the weather was great, so we broke camp, packed everything up, stacked our meat bags on brush at the water's edge, took down the tent, and waited. We built a fire and burned up and scraps and trash that were left by previous visitors (I even cleaned up their "Schmidt house" - used toilet paper, etc. looked terrible in the otherwise beautiful Alaskan wilderness). While trying to clean the area up, I had the bright idea to eliminate some weight (since we now had 4 caribou that we didn't have coming in) by burning up seeming non-essentials such as unused fuel and food. We waited by the shore of the slough all day until at dusk we realized that the pilot was not coming. We reset the tent and within 30 minutes heavy winds and rain hit us hard and we waited in the tent for three additional days until we were finally picked up.
LESSON!!!!! - Alaskan weather is highly unpredictable and work ethics vary! Don't burn up anything until you see the plane in the air! I felt stupid and, hind sight being 20/20, I learned that lesson the hard way. Everything worked out fine, but things like food and fuel don't weigh that much and are potentially useful if things take a turn for the worse.
Other lesson (learned earlier in the hunt): You realize walking back to camp with a loaded pack that those caribou were a lot farther out on the tundra than you originally thought.
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