Two Pennsylvania men had several close encounters with Alaska brown bears during a hunt in May that ended with one of them getting a huge, trophy-sized bruise.
Big game hunter John Neilson Jr., 39, of Limerick, Montgomery County, and his packer guide Frank Barcio, 34, of Erie, enjoyed an incredible adventure that ended with a trophy-sized bear in it Alaska Peninsula.
Clients fly to Anchorage and then take a smaller plane to an airport in King Salmon to meet their guide Tracy Vrem of Blue Mountain Lodge and guide Aaron Johnson. From there, the guide takes his clients to a shelter. Then the hunters fly back to their camp. “It’s an incredibly remote area,” Barcio said of the tundra.
They saw bears of different sizes every day and some got too close to their camp for comfort.
On May 9, while they were setting up their tent, a heavy wild boar walked 50 meters from their camp. The guide fired rubber bullets and then a 12-gauge loaded with buckshot to scare the large carnivore back into the desert.
“You sleep with one eye half open,” Neilson said of the bears. “But there’s really not much you can do once you’re sleeping.”
On May 11, his handler was eating a sandwich when a sow with litters began to approach. Fortunately, the bears ran when he yelled at them.
The next day, Neilson was returning to camp when he saw a bear walking toward his tent. “I yelled ‘Hey bear’ and threw my rifle over my head, the bear looked at me, I took off the scope cover, put a cartridge in the chamber and yelled again ‘Hey bear!'” he wrote in his notes of his adventure. The bear saw him and slowly turned around and started walking away from the store. “Once I got to the store, I quickly took off my boots, put on clean underwear, and then waited outside the store.”
Barcio said the camps have heavy steel barrels to deposit trash and that there is an electric fence around the perimeter of the camp. If a bear touches the fence with its snout, the jolt scares it. “It’s more of a safety net for us to sleep at night,” he said.
Neilson said with a laugh: “I think the bear fence is more of a psychological thing for us. I don’t know if it will do much good against a bear.”
The royal hunt
Neilson shot his bear on May 14. When the men first saw the old bear, they had to walk about 500 meters through stream crossings, steep banks and a thick stand of alder trees. They stopped 200 meters from the animal, which was lying in thick undergrowth.
While waiting for it to move, six caribou grazed the area and fortunately the bear did not chase them. “I think I was just tired, it was a warmer day and the sun was out,” Neilson said. “They literally tiptoed around (the bear), watched it, and ran past it. “It was kind of fun.”
The hunters observed the area for about seven hours until the large boar began to walk. Neilson fired his .338 Weatherby RPM and hit the bear. He fired three more times just to make sure the great beast was down for good.
“There aren’t many places in North America where you go and you’re on your turf,” Neilson said. “It’s a completely surreal feeling and you come to a different mindset and a state where the time has come. It’s really an adrenaline rush for me. I love it. I think it’s amazing and obviously it’s stressful. You have so many different emotions flowing through your brain and body. But when you get on them and it all comes together, it’s really a great experience and feeling. It’s fun.”
Some of the habitat is dense, where you can’t see very far and never know where the bears will be. Barcio said, “You can be 200 feet from a bear at one point and not even know it.”
When the hunt happens, you have no choice but to focus on the task at hand.
“You have to get on them and you have to do it when you have to, whether it’s mentally pushing yourself to climb this bench that normally you probably wouldn’t be able to lift unless you have the adrenaline to get you through it. . It is probably, single-handedly, one of the most difficult and rewarding things I have ever done, even as a packer, to learn how to guide. Pushing yourself through that to get revenge on that bear was a lot,” Barcio said.
The next morning they packed up the bear skin and headed about two miles to their camp. The meat is not consumed because there is concern that it has trichinosis. Neilson said the main reason large wild boars are hunted is to control predators. Large male carnivores can attack cubs and sows.
“If they see a sow with puppies, they will try to kill them so that the sow goes into heat and they can reproduce her. They also kill a lot of younger wild boars, the ones that are on the rise,” Neilson said. “It’s a mathematical game of predator and population control to keep everything healthy, from caribou to moose, and everything has an effect.”
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“Alaska does a great job of tag management and how many bears they want in each unit based on population studies and other animals that are in the area and I think they do a great job of that. Basically, you don’t hunt them for meat, you hunt them for predator control in the state.”
Neilson, who is in the business of land development and property management, has been a serious big-game hunter for the past nine years.
“I hunt a lot. Normally every spring and every fall I go to Canada or Alaska,” she said. “This is my fourth grizzly.”
He has hunted the other grizzly bears on Kodiak Island in southeastern Alaska near Cordova, and one in Interior Alaska.
The bear he shot in May is Neilson’s largest to date. It is similar in size to your Kodiak bear, but the skull is at least an inch larger. The Kodiak Island bear was 27.5 inches and this one is “easily 28 and a half,” he said of his green score.
The skulls must be dried for 60 days before they are officially scored for the Boone and Crockett Club record system. In the case of the Alaskan brown bear, the skull must measure a minimum of 26 inches for an award and at least 28 inches for all-time recognition.
“It should be easy to make Boone and Crockett a success in the grizzly bear case,” he said. The bears are skinned where they fall and there is no way to weigh the animal. However, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Gamea large male can weigh up to 1,500 pounds in coastal areas.
The pelt measures 9 feet 9 inches square, which is a measurement from nose to tail and paw to paw of the front paws added together and divided by 2.
Barcio, who is learning a little about everything from preparing planes for remote areas to judging the size of bears for hunters, said this was an ideal hunt for his guide training.
“It was a complete experience, from seeing the bear to having to do a couple of moves, which is an intense hike to get to the next place, and finally seeing the bear and waiting for it for seven hours and finally seeing John (Nelson) fall. “This bear and the whole package was everything a bear hunt could be, plus getting an all-time Boone and Crockett bear, so it would be hard to get any better,” Barcio said.
Neilson agreed. “For me it was a complete experience with the brown bear. The supplier was top class without a doubt,” he said. “This was done first class and I got the complete and ultimate experience with a grizzly bear and I got a Boone and Crockett animal, which is an incredible hunt. Definitely an incredible experience. “I’m lucky to be able to do this kind of thing.”
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Neilson preserves the memories of his hunts through taxidermy and plans to make a complete bear mount similar to what he has done with his other bears and a variety of other animals such as deer, elk, elk, caribou and sheep, and smaller animals such as a coyote and a wolverine.
“I try to make them life-size to do the animals justice. It’s a great display,” she said.
Both men look forward to future hunts and encourage others to visit America’s wild frontier.
“I would say that anyone from Pennsylvania should try to see Alaska once in their life, at least once,” Barcio said.
Brian Whipkey is an outdoor columnist for the KeynoteUSA Network sites in Pennsylvania. Contact him atbwhipkey@gannett.com and sign up to receive our weekly Go Outdoors PA newsletter by email on the home page of this website with your username. Follow him on Facebook@whipkeyoutdoors.
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