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When a guided hunt falls apart... experience?

**WARNING** long read.

Hi everyone, new guy here. I’ve enjoyed visiting this site and reading your stories and your pictures about hunting. I like the group of people who participate here. The open exchange of information and the general upbeat mood of the board is great. Afterfollowing Hunter 59's post I've decidied to leave lurking status and participate. I'm sorry that its an unpleasant topic.

That said, I’d like to hear from anyone who has had a “not so good” experience on a hunting trip that was booked through a booking agent, and how you dealt with it. All names will be held in strict confidence to protect the innocent! I guess the best way to put this is I feel I’ve really gotten the short end of the stick on a recent hunt, but don’t know if I was expecting too much, or this is just the way it is in this industry. So tell me what you think.

First, allow me to tell you a little bit about myself. I’m in my early 40’s and have been hunting since I was 12 years old, not unlike most of you I’m sure. My experience has been almost exclusively on a “do it yourself” basis. I’m the kind of hunter who, when I’m going hunting, I’m going hunting. There’s no such thing as going in too far. Horses are not a problem. Spike camps? Great! Way back in for a week? Awesome! In the last few years I’ve come to a point in my life that I’m finally able to scrape a few dollars together, enough to let someone else take care of all the details associated with a hunt for an animal not accessible close to home. Mind you, this wasn’t a top shelf hunt, but wasn’t bargain basement either. The hunt came to my attention through a friend who had booked the hunt with one of his friends, but ultimately they were unable to go. It didn’t sound like something I was interested in at the time, (Canadian moose, with a bear option) but after a little research, I was interested. The hunt was to be a lodge/cabin based hunt. The actual hunting conducted with the use of riverboats to access the vast river drainage, exclusive to the outfitter. The thought of sleeping in a bed, and having a hot meal and a shower every night didn’t sound too bad either. Something different than I was used to, but hey, it doesn’t sound too shabby I’ll give it a try.

I didn’t want to go by myself, so I presented the hunt to a friend. I gave him all the info I had, website info, and the booking agent faxed him the outfitters brochure. He kicked it around a little, we asked some questions, and decided to go. The booking agent described the actual hunt as it was advertised on his web site. Get up, breakfast, grab a lunch, and go. The boats were parked in the water right in front of the remotely located lodge/cabin and used to access “haunts” where we’d call for bulls. Some hiking, maybe a quad ride here or there, but basically anything it took to get the moose. Come back to the lodge/cabin for a hot meal at night and do I again the next day. This was confirmed with the outfitter in a phone conversation several weeks before the hunt. He said he’d do “whatever it takes” to get us a bull. He said he had boats, quads, and trucks, and would get us to where we needed to be to get our bulls. I was impressed with his gung-ho demeanor, and felt good about having a quality experience. He has enjoyed very high success with his hunts, so I had no reason to doubt his or the booking agents information. I was given references, but didn’t call them, which was a mistake, but ultimately would not have mattered anyway. So if you’re still with me, read on………

A few days before departure the booking agent calls to see if I’m ready to go, if I need anything else, and to wish me luck on the hunt. He tells me that if anything gets screwed up on the hunt, and I’m not happy with the way anything is going with the hunt, let the outfitter know right away, he’ll do what he can to remedy anything that needs attention, or is being over looked. I ask a couple of questions, like how’s the hunting, the weather, etc. and all is good. I ask If there’s any changes I should know about, and this is when he tells me the outfitter bought a new lodge, and it’s better than the last one.

Great! Off we go!

After a couple of little kinks in getting there, we arrive in camp. “Camp” is now a large converted “shed” (with a blue tarp roof because of leaks) in a small residential neighborhood about an hours drive from the outfitters territory. To reach the true boundary of the outfitters territory takes less than an hour, but by no means is it seriously hunt-able. The first hunt-able area takes an hour plus. Road conditions are a factor.

We get the tour of camp. The sleeping arrangements require us to climb a near vertical set of homemade steps into the unheated attic of the shed. Hunters upstairs, guides, downstairs. There’s a couple of out houses, and a self serve shower that consists of a shower stall, a propane burner, bucket, and a solar shower bag to fill with the water you heat yourself.

Chow hall. This would also be the outfitters quarters. All meals in camp are served here. The camp cook, and manager when the outfitter wasn’t around, took residence here. It was a small converted ranch style house, maybe 1000 sq. feet. There isn’t a river, or boat in sight.

Hunting. Hunting was now a road hunt because of the new camp. Day 1 of the hunt was with 2 guides in a 4 door pick up, because the other hunters that were supposed to be there didn’t arrive due to travel difficulties. The territory consists of 3 roads, each about 70 kilometers in length. One stand alone road, a second, and one requiring full travel of the second road to access. At the end of day one we got stuck at the entrance to road # 2, requiring winching to get out. The guides declared the road as impassible and refused to take their trucks past this point for the remainder of the hunt. This left road #2, and #3 unavailable to us unless we walked. This left us with 1 road to hunt. Upon our arrival at camp, the other hunters, of which there are 3 have now arrived. One confides in me that they’re supposed to have the place to themselves, and was rather surprised to see us.

Day 2, the outfitter takes 2 of the new hunters to the area of the original lodge on the river with a quad, and a jon boat with an outboard for 3 days, leaving 1 from their party to hunt with the other guide in our camp, 1 X 1 in the 4 door truck. We get put in the single cab 4wd with our guide. I ask our guide if it would be possible to swap out trucks for comfort sake, to which he says “good idea”, but it never happens, I assume because they’re hired by the outfitter as independent contractors, and use their own trucks. So, we spend our 14 hour days….. 3 big guys in the front seat of a pickup truck, road hunting.

Food. Food was decent when the outfitter was in camp. His wife/cook/camp manager did a decent job when he was there. When he wasn’t there, it was what I could only describe as prison style. When we arrived at camp we HAD to immediately report to the chow hall to eat so she could go to bed. No time to stretch legs, get out of clothing, start a fire, or even drink a beer. If we didn’t, she’d pull the guides aside and give them an ass chewing for not making us come to dinner, IMMEDIATELY. The food, while nourishing, was pathetic. Breakfast was pretty much, “there’s the cereal”. One morning we had muffins on the table that were moldy, which everyone passed on. Hot breakfast came only when the hubby was there, or we saw the hot breakfast leftovers (left over from when the outfitter was in camp) when he wasn’t. One morning she overslept, and blamed it on a power outage that never occurred. Lunch was bologna sandwiches,… every day. And you weren’t allowed more than 1 can of soda. All meals were done as cheaply as possible. The only meat we had was game meat from last year. We saw the same bowl of mixed veggies for 8 days. A little was stirred in each day to make it appear somewhat fresh.

Anyway, back to the hunting. Our guide was very experienced, and had a personality the worked quite well with ours. I really enjoyed his company. About day 3 of the hunt, we finally saw our first moose, but road traffic prevented us from actually calling, or putting on a stalk. The next morning, we spotted a small group of moose across a river in the area and went the half mile or so to the rivers edge to have a better look, and to see if one of the bulls could be called across the river. At the rivers edge, we took up a position to call to the last area the moose were spotted. I had my video camera up and running. A cow appeared about 150 yards down river, but across the river. The opposite bank was a long wide gravel bar that extended 20-30 yards from the waters edge. A shooter bull followed her out and stood on the riverbank behind her for a good 5 minutes. The guide wouldn’t allow my partner to shoot the bull because it was on the wrong side of the river. It would have been an easy shot. We had no way to get to it after it was down. (remember, this was a “riverboat” hunt) We discussed our options, one suggested by the guide, was to offer one of residents in the area $100 to rent their boat to get the moose. Before we knew it, the bull decided he didn’t want to hang out in the open anymore, and retreated into the alders away from the river. We decided that it was worth having the guide call to the bull to draw him across the river and closer to us. After a couple of cow calls, 2 different smaller bulls appeared directly across the river from us and liked what they heard. The guide worked his way a behind us to make it sound like the cow was heading away from them. This worked. The larger of the 2 bulls swam across the river directly towards us. He came ashore about 10 yards downstream of our position. The only problem was, we were on top of a cut bank at a slight bend in the river, approximately 7 or 8 feet above the waters surface. The water was deep right up to the shore because of the cut bank, and the “beach” area was only a couple of feet wide. The moose had no way of getting up onto the bench we were on it was way too steep. He walked along the waters edge at one point just a couple of feet below us and never made an attempt to come up. Had we shot him, and he not instantly collapsed stone dead in his tracks, he would have ended up back in the river, and most likely lost. He decided he didn’t want to be on our side of the river anymore so he swam back across to join the other bull. We watched them for a while from the wrong side of the river at about 60 yards. Got it all on video! The guide decided to move upstream to try to call them across at a point where they could get up on the riverbank. It didn’t work. We bitched to the guide for a while about not being able to take any of the bulls we saw, he understood our frustration and took it all in stride. Best case scenario would have been to locate a boat and get across the river by dark, dress the moose and return in the morning to recover the animal. That night it rained all night and the river was up 5-6 feet from the previous day. I’m convinced the guide made the right call given the circumstances. The rain and swollen river would have surely taken the moose away by morning. That is if a grizzly didn’t get to it first.

Our next day wasn’t too bad. I decided to ride standing in the back of the pick-up so I wasn’t stuffed in the cab with the other guys. It gave us all more room. Around 1:00 as we came over a slight rise, I saw a dark shape on the side of the road about 150 yards ahead. A banged on the side of the cab to let the guide know there was something on the road. A bear. He stopped the truck, took a look through his binoculars and said “shoot that bear”. I exited the truck and shot the bear. Total time elapsed was less than a minute. It was over in an instant. No moose that day.

The next day the outfitter returns to camp and says to me I hear you got a bear congratulations. “That will be $750 U.S. I want the cash now.” I was a little taken aback by his ballsy way of getting his trophy fee and took the opportunity to bring up the shortcomings we were experiencing on the hunt. The fact that there was no boat to be had wasn’t a problem to him. It was our fault. He said we should have shot the bulls, drove back 2 hours to his residence to get a skiff he had at home. Had we done that we never would have recovered the bulls because of the rain. I thought at this point he should have HIMSELF gone and got the equipment necessary to see that this never happened again. He didn’t. Instead, he went to the chow hall to tend to the other hunters who I came to find out, financed the new “lodge” for him. The other lodge on the river apparently was rendered inhabitable by martins over the course of the previous winter.

I realize I’m being pretty long winded here, and will wrap this up. Too many small details that would take entirely too much time here to run through, so I’ll wrap this up.

Any other attempts to communicate with this guy ended with the same lack of resolution. It even turned into him accusing us of being rude. When he would tell us we expected too much, his wife would jump in and pick up where he left off. I couldn’t even get a word in to respond to most of the things they said because of being double teamed by them. My partner had the same problem.

Fast forward to the last day, last hour of the hunt, guide see’s tracks on the road. A mile later, we come up to the bull, he’s on the road, I shoot him. Hunt over.

So, If and when any of you had a hunt go haywire, how did you handle it? Let it slide? Ask for a refund? File a complaint with the outfitters association? Was I expecting too much to expect the type of hunt I paid for? Or, as the outfitter said “ You got your bull, what else do you want?” Should I shut up and be happy even though the outfitted hunt sucked? What say you?