Kings Of The Spring

Three for three DIY in Prince of Wales, Alaska.

- Cory Staniforth

Three native Oregonians received the confirmation email stating we successfully drew Alaska’s Southeast bear tag for 2016. Todd Freitag, Scott Thorpe, and myself were now in the frantic planning stage of the hunt. We all have harvested many trophy-quality bears in Oregon, but the famous Prince of Wales (POW) Island bears were a whole new breed we’d never hunted.

In one short year, we made a plan to step into a vast range of wilderness where ocean meets isolated islands full of monster black bear, Sitka blacktail deer and wolves. Being the adventurers we all are, we had the drive to push farther than many would want to go. The plan was to rent a boat and cruise across open channels of water to reach an uninhabited island that had very little hunting pressure. I wanted to pursue bears in a fashion we have never experienced. Cruising the shorelines with the intent of spot-and-stalk archery hunting was the plan, but plans don’t always works out.

The day had come; we were halfway across the first channel of open water on an aluminum boat with a small outboard motor. The boat was plumb full of our hunting equipment, camping supplies and enough food to last seven days. The reality of what we were doing was setting in and actually started to become a little scary. Here I am with two other buddies in a remote area of Southeast (SE) Alaska heading to uncharted land with zero cell service to reach out for help. We are on our own now with the help of nobody but ourselves. Three hours into our boat ride, the water started getting big, the rain started coming down sideways, and getting all the way to our destination might be cut short due to this storm. Against all odds we pushed through the storm and made it to our destination, an old abandoned logging camp abandoned in the 1960’s.