Arctic Adventures

Glass  I had been hanging on hoping that I might get another chance to take the boat out one last weekend. (two weeks ago now) I was stymied by low water, ice, and a potential trip to the Wulik River. A couple of guys had been planning on taking snowmachines across the tundra and creeks about 50 miles to the Wulik to load up on trout. Unfortunately the trip didn't happen, but I am not ruling out a winter, or springtime trip.   I Need A Skate Sharpener (can actually go fast across this though) The first day I went ice fishing was the 8th. We are finally able to drive the honda's across. Caleb, Zachary, and I headed to the slough with visions of catching sackfuls of trout with rod and reel. It wasn't happening though. There was very little open water and all of it shallow. We tried chumming the shallow water, but nothing much showed up. We went out onto the ice, and used our casting rods to jig. I caught one whitefish.  Scared of the Vacuum I used one o...

It has been tough sledding here this past week. The weather has been brutal so far this year, and this week was no exception. I took the neighbor, and Caleb out on Tuesday right after school. On Monday a whole bunch of caribou crossed and a couple boats caught 10 caribou each. It was raining steadily, and the wind was whipping out of the south. There are decent sized waves on the river when it is whistling out of the south. Made for a rough ride. We braved the elements and went anyway. I was only planning on going maybe as far as Sugar, but we ended up going up to Evelynn's. About an hour and a half at full throttle. There were a couple of other boats watching the far bank so we pulled up to them. They said they hadn't seen anything. We waited there for about a half hour and headed back down, idling with the current. I should have just cruised back. We idled back down to Sugar which put us at 8:30 and and hour of cruising to go with daylight fading quickly. Needless to say I ab...

  Its Snow!   We didn't do much this past week during the week. The weather has been brutal all week. North wind and cold. Today it snowed hard for about an hour, and then it all melted.   Oren Likes to Draw Yesterday the neighbor Kyle and I took a ride upriver. We've been hearing reports of caribou crossing the Red Dog Road by the thousands. Apparently they had to shut down the road for a while because there were so many. We got a late start, took me almost two hours to get ready for a longer ride like that. We headed out around 11:30. It was extremely nice when we left Noatak. The sun was shining, and it felt about 40 degrees out. Once we got out of town the wind picked up and it clouded over, I felt like I should have worn my parkie. It took us about an hour to get up to Sugar. We saw a really blonde grizz eating fish on the bank, so we drifted by it to snap a few photos. I briefly contemplated shooting it, but that would have meant the end of our carib...