#1528998 - 09/18/1301:41 PM
Re: Alaska trip, some fishing, some hunting....
[Re: D-Rock]
Tod Osier
Member
Registered: 04/13/04
Posts: 1587
Loc: Newtown, CT
Originally Posted By: D-Rock
Thank you for posting. Truly a great story of a summer well spent. Seems like it was right out of the pages of national geographic. The quality of your photos and documentation are certainly worthy of being published! What was your biggest challenge on a trip like that? Equipment? Or finding room in the icebox for all your goodies?
Biggest issue on a trip like that is planning, and keeping at the planning, planning was almost a full time job for several months. Some of the planning is easy to keep up on, but following through with some of it gets tedious (e.g., talk to biologists about hunting = easy, figgure out what gear to buy to fish for pink salmon = fun, figgure out what days to rent sat phone for and from whom = boring and work). Just keeping on it is important. To do a long trip, you research a lot more than you can actually do, so a lot of work ends up wasted. I do most of the planning and fuggure out the range and variety of things we can do and then Jen and I go through and figgure out exactly what things we want to do.
#1529005 - 09/18/1301:51 PM
Re: Alaska trip, some fishing, some hunting....
[Re: Joe Grenus]
Tod Osier
Member
Registered: 04/13/04
Posts: 1587
Loc: Newtown, CT
Originally Posted By: Joe Grenus
I have to agree with everyone. Best post ever.Going 60 miles with your wife,son,2 dogs,all your gear,yourself and a Caribou in a friggin raft takes some brass ones. Just awesome!!How much planning did this trip take? How did you keep the freezer running? Thanks for the story Todd.
Thanks, trip planning took a year with the last 4-6 months pretty much a few hours per day. I had to have the transporter for the float reserved in the winter because we were flying during a heavy flight period (beginning of sheep season), but once that was locked in that made the rest of the schedule more clear.
Freezer is easy, we dropped it when we were on the Kenai and just worked on filling it and when we went on the float, we dropped it in Fairbanks for 2 weeks. People in AK expect to help on stuff like that since meat and fish are so important up there. I'm confident that you could just drive down the road and randomly knock on doors and if not the first person, but the second would offer either freezer space or space to plug a freezer in. On the drive back, I had a couple hundred pounds of meat and fish in it, so it had a large thermal mass keeping it chilled. I ran it on the generator a few hours per day. When it was hot in the lower 48 I plugged it in overnight to make sure it was really cold.