salukipv1

awesome animal! best of luck.


pretty sure I'm doing a full mount when I get one.


bow sounds pretty tough, rifle pretty easy.

Chopayne

I thought you had to pay something like $9000 for the federal conservation fee or something? $4500 isnt bad at all. Does that include shipping your mount back to Alaska?

AK Jeff

There's no federal conservation fee in Alaska. The transporter is $3,000, AK resident muskox tag is $500, airfare between Bethel and Mekoryuk is about $500, and there's a $100 trespass fee to the village on Nunivak. I'll use Alaska Airline miles to fly from Fairbanks to Bethel. Meat and trophy shipping between Mekoryuk and Fairbanks will probably run $300-$500.

You have to draw the DX003 permit before you can even consider this hunt. Odds of drawing last year were about 3%.

iamyourhuckleberry

Albert,

I did a musk ox hunt on Victoria Island, NWT, Canada for around $6000, when it was all said and done. The adventure of getting to the island was as much fun as the hunt itself. These beast's shaggy, sand filled, coats stop an arrow like a bag target. I would recommend a 3 to 1 ratio two blade broadhead for the best penetration, and a heavier arrow if possible from your 70 pound bow.

A life size mount is a great way to capture the uniqueness of this animal. I did the work on mine myself. It cost $800 for tanning and another $800 for the form. Add another $50 for eyes and incidentals. It took me two days to stitch him up...

I had this one come up behind me while hunting Caribou on the "Sag" in Alaska.



This is the one I took on Victoria Island

Chopayne

Hmm I wonder what website I looked at that made the price $9000-$12,000. $6,000 is a bit more affordable and only slightly more than what Jeff is paying.

$1650 to have a full body mount is about 1/4 of the price it wouldve cost a taxidermist to do correct? Pretty interesting, Id like to mount alot of what I hunt but ive heard it is about 1-2 year wait and it costs alot.

Jeff are you stationed out there in Alaska? I met someone over here in Afghanistan who is really big into big game hunting and deep sea fishing, said he got most of it knocked out while he was stationed there. Im thinking about trying for Alaska, but that is a few years away. However, I wouldn't want to get stationed at Ft Wainwright and would prefer Ft Richardson, I dont do well with extreme cold weather and im an absolute terrible driver in snow.

AK Jeff

No I'm not stationed in AK, I just live there. It's a really tough and expensive place to hunt but it has it's perks. I much prefer Fairbanks to Anchorage myself. They're both cold and the traffic in Anchorage is awful.

Chopayne

By tough you mean weather, by expensive do you mean the cost of living? or tags/gas/lodging and all those other little things which become big?

AK Jeff

Transportation is the big expense for hunting in Alaska. The state is huge and sparsely populated but there are very few roads and the ones that we do have get heavy hunting pressure. More remote hunts usually require air taxis which usually cost thousands of dollars. Winters are very long up here. Today is May 8th and the snow is still knee deep around my house. Tags for the most part are free for residents (with the exception of musk ox which is $500). Cost of living up here is some of the highest in the country even though we don't have state sales tax or a state income tax and when you're eligible you can receive the PFD payment. If you live in the bush the cost of living is exponentially higher still. It's cheaper for me to fly to Montana to hunt deer and elk as a non-resident than it is for me to hunt them as a resident here in Alaska. The scale of everything up here is hard to grasp for people that haven't been here. Take the Haul Road caribou hunt for example. That's one of the most affordable caribou hunts available, but it still requires an 800+ mile round trip drive on one of the most rugged roads in the country and there's still a lot of hunting pressure. Last fall the 40-mile caribou season near Fairbanks was only open for 24 hours. In terms of moose hunting some of the most productive moose habitat up here only has 1 or 2 moose per square mile so you can look long and hard before you even see one. I hunted a walk-in caribou area last fall and that still required a 250 mile round trip drive and over 20 miles of hiking, and that's considered pretty easy. If you like the lower 48 style of drive a few miles to a hunting area, walk a 1/4 mile and sit in a tree stand then Alaska probably isn't your cup of tea. If you like hardcore adventure that requires a lot of backbreaking work without seeing many animals then it might suit you just fine. There's opportunities here they just don't come easy.

Chopayne

Wow that does sound extreme. I get what you say about Alaska being expensive, im stationed in Hawaii, get paid more than my friends in the states but still feel really poor. No idea if its Alaska>Hawaii or Hawaii>Alaska. I don't mind backpacking and camping through rugged terrain, how do you pack your meat out though?

Would I be better off hunting in Canada?

AK Jeff

Define better off. I'm pretty certain all Canadian provinces require guides for non-resident aliens. Guides mean higher prices. It's all relative to what you want and what your budget is. Hunting Alaska is very doable it's just much much harder than most people realize. People tend to think Alaska is awash in game animals when the reality is most of the state is effectively devoid of life due to the harsh environments. What it takes to hunt effectively here is just a lot more than most people can handle. Not trying to rain on your parade, just being honest.