Kamchatka moose Hunt
 

Soooo here goes

I’ve always heard about the moose in Kamchatka. How they are the biggest in the world. And I never thought in a million years that I would ever go hunting for one.

Well I found a hunt at one of th big auctions and figured if it goes for this, it would be worth doing. Low and behold I won.. Now what lol

The planning began almost immediately, from making flight arraignments, to pick the right rifle, then the right caliber. You have to remember that Kamchatka is frozen in time around the middle of the Cold War. New technology like binoculars aren’t very common. Then making sure you have enough gear to cover a very wide variety of conditions. It was search and search and search for the right gear. Not just any gear. Stuff that wouldn’t let you down 4/5 ths on the other side of the world.

I’m pretty lucky, I can make 2 phone calls and get first hand experience on virtually every hunt on the planet. I was making those calls.

My outfitter was great to work with. They helped out with a bunch. But there is a lot of things that must be done correctly or your not going to be going very far, or having very much fun. Little things like picking which airline you fly with can cost you a lot of extra money in the long run. Learned a lot of invaluable lessons.

So the day comes to leave and I start flying
If your flying with a firearm you have to go through Moscow
So I fly to Toronto, then to Europe, then off to Moscow. Land in Moscow, do all my paperwork and off to the hotel. The direct flight to Kamchatka leaves at like 2 pm and there’s no way you will get your paper work done in time. It’s like the 80’s here with the way they do business. They have computers but everything is hand written and there’s tons and tons of paper work and security checks. The customs officers don’t move very fast either. Think of a Canadian govt worker in slow motion... if they can pass the buck onto someone else they will.

So fly out from Moscow to petropavlosk
Flight number 4, nice short one. Only 9 hours
We land in petro, do our customs stuff again. Head to the liquor store for supplies. If your drinking beer, get the bubba kegs. They are tougher and won’t break or freeze. I found that the cheap $3 vodka was just as good as the high end $14 bottles lol. Get lots, your guide will love you. But don’t let them help themselves or they will get dickered by themselves when your sleeping.
From petro is a short 6 hour drive To camp
Most of the road is paved to milkovo and from there it’s gravel.
You get cell service for about a 10km radius of milkovo then it’s gone for good.

My outfitter and a German couple go to one camp mine is just down the road. Only about 10km back on the main road and then 45km into the bush on a glorified atv trail lol. Welcome to Russia lol. Road is surprisingly good, and we spot 3 bears in the way in. Time to get hunting!

We when we pull into camp there is 2 moose skulls from the previous hunters stand up as we pull in. I’ve seen what I thought were big moose before and these were off the charts! One was low 60’s with incredibly long pans, the other was what I was hoping to find! Really wide, good size pans, deep and long, tons of mass and the one side had was curved in and had crazy mass! They measured this guy and he was 70”’s. Tons of character! Never seen anything like it before!
Meet the main guide and his wife, who is our cook and interpreter. Start asking them about the 2 moose that they had shot already, and the guide just shrugs his shoulders and says that they are average? I’m wondering if they were playing a joke on me, but they were 100% serious about these bulls not being anything special. Now I’m getting really excited to start hunting!

There’s 3 ways to hunt moose out here

1 get them calling in the rut on foot
It’s the cheapest way and can be very successful
This is what I planned on doing

2 Hunt then in dec on skidoo
Find a fresh set of tracks and follow it in the deep deep snow
It’s a few thousand more but Guys get some really big bulls
Only downside is the moose shed their antlers in dec and they have had bulls lose their antlers before you could get them

3 helicopters
Not really the most ethical. But holy cow do they get some monsters! I have some pics of ones that they got this year and they have to be pushing 80”
This kind of “hunting” is not cheap! Take one of those Yukon or Alaska moose hunts. And that’s your rental of the helicopter alone for 2 days. Never mind the cost of the animals. Guy sharing camp with me is a neurosurgeon from Spain. His buddies took the chopper for 3 days. They got a big bull, a smaller brown bear and a few snow sheep. They didn’t see as many moose as I would have expected. But that one alone made up for it in my mind

We arrived on the 28th to camp and we just missed the rut

The 2 bulls the group before us got were shot 3 days before we arrived to camp

They were responding to the call very aggressively and as soon as we arrived It went cold

We were hunting the foot hills of the mountains and the bush is very thick. We were hunting “newer” and old forest cuts
I was expecting that there would be lots of glassing and maybe some similar terrain to bc or Yukon Alaska.. Wrong.. your typical shot out here is 50-100 yards. There isn’t many areas where you can even see much further. Since you can’t see very far you put on the miles on your boots. We averaged around 14 km the most in 1 day was 20km. Walk call.. walk call.. walk call. Day 4 I got lucky. I was able to talk with my hands enough to get my Russian only speaking guide, to go check out the closest thing I seen to a cut line. We come up over a hill and there he was.. My Kamchatka bull! He was about 350 yards away and walking our direction. We hit the bush and creep up about 50 yards To a good vantage point and he’s still coming our way. Now I’m trying to talk with my hands and get my guide to get the f out of the way because I’m going to blast this moose. It’s hard to explain how a muzzle brake works to someone that has never seen one and can’t speak the same language lol. So the moose is still coming our way. At about 175 yards he turns broadside, I got a good rest with the shooting stick and I’m solid pressed up against as spruce tree. First shot, right behind the shoulder. The bull sucked up that 200 gr a-frame like it was 1 of the bizzillion flys out there. He runs about 25 yar[IMG]http://imgur.com/hWW6, I light him up again. He goes another 20 yards towards the bush and I can see the steam coming from his lungs. I drill him again and he goes into the bush. FYI these things are tough!

I ranged where I thought he went into the bush from where we shot and it was 257 yards We rush up there since light was fading and i wanted to at least find some good blood before it gets dark! No need to look for blood, he only made it 10 yards into the bush! Big bull down! Ended up being 62”, nice pans. I was more than happy.

I’ll include some pics
More to the story to come
Phones going to die
I made a mistake and I’m stuck in Moscow for a couple days

http://imgur.com/hWW6GfR
http://imgur.com/bLrGVX5
http://imgur.com/G4C2BzY
http://imgur.com/UBhfARG http://imgur.com/a0xofE9

Awesome write up and beautiful bull👍

X2 Congrats and thank you for sharing.

BW

Exciting to say the least. once in a life time also.
send us pics when you can and finish up your story.

Excellent thanks for the write-up, just wondering what the cost differential is from there with everything included tip, guides ,hotels airfares to the Yukon hunt are Alaska hunt.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

Wow that is one hell of a story! Congrats on your hunt.
Question- are you allowed to bring home trophies?

Details
 

I was actually just looking into booking a Kamchatka moose hunt here for next year, maybe you would be able to share some deeper information with me thru PM. Sounds like a great adventure forsure.

Look forward to speaking with you soon. Great bull as well.

Great story, awesome bull. Has to be a lotto win for me to fulfill my Yukon moose hunt dream, would have to be a big lotto win to go for the Russian moose lol.

Thanks for posting

Yes you can bring back the trophy’s
The meat.. obviously you can’t just because of the logistics
I’m coming back. So if anyone is interested in doing this hunt also. Shoot me a pm
I’m going to be doing a spring bear and a fall/winter moose

Right on, congrats on a fantastic bull !

Thanks for sharing your experience, certainly a hunt on the bucket list !

Great write up. Gets the juices flowing.

wow
 

Great story! Would live to go there sometime!!!
Thanks for sharing!

how much did this cost?

normal price is 15k usd
6500 to add a brown bear

15000 us ,what about everything all in, Airlines paperwork ,Customs, anything else that you would need going to a third world country, just trying to figure out if the Yukon would be cheaper or not thanks.

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Great write up. Well done on the moose.
Sounds like a fantastic time

What a wonderful hunt & trip!! Thanks for sharing. Awaiting pics!

Shoot me a pm with your number
I’ll call you when I get back

Are those pics not working?

Yes they open up in Imgur. But we want more pictures! And more stories!

Lol gotcha
More of the story to come

Moose
 

Great story. You must have one patient wife at home and a good butcher....

Hahaha I do and a couple good taxidermists

Copy the direct link in IMGUR and enter in the insert image icon here. Then the pics will show here.

I enjoyed your story so much i was going to make popcorn and read it again. Congrats on the bull.

More of the trip
 

Ok here’s some more of the trip

First thing I have to add is that if your single/ divorced
In your 30’s-40’s
This is the trip for you lol
There is a LOT, and I mean a LOT of good looking women over here

I have to back it up a bit
So we land in petropavlosk and we do everything we gotta do, we get our guns and luggage. Then we go outside to go meet our driver who’s taking us to camp. Walk out side and see this
https://imgur.com/gallery/ZjyKqgb
Fly 4/5 of the way around the world and now we have to trust a Cummins to make it to camp. I thought to myself... why why why?? Everything has gone so smoothly til now. I made sure I put my dodge pushing boots on and had my tailgate friendly gloves near by.. lucky they weren’t needed 😉

Our camp for the hunt was nice. Wasn’t 5 star but hey, it was way better than any tent. They had a sauna that we could use every night to wash, clean up, and to relax. The buildings were very well insulated. Had a fire going in the stoves during dinner and never needed anything more. Food was amazing!
These are some pics from one of their bear camps. Pics of our camp are on my Gopro

https://imgur.com/gallery/ipYmG2I

Here’s a pic of the “cutline” where I shot my moose
And some of the views

https://imgur.com/gallery/KvOBKGd

You come to a place like Kamchatka and you realize how good we have it back home. We whine and complain about how hard we have it. This place is stuck in the Cold War. There are buildings that you drive by and think they are about to fall over and that is someone’s home. I’m 100% positive that the camo I had on and my binoculars were worth more than everything my trapper guide had in worldly possessions. Words can’t describe that feeling. Not of being a better person, but more of a feeling of being thankful for what I have more than what I don’t.
https://imgur.com/gallery/o7F2Ggt
Yes those are holes/gaps under the roof

Now to talk about the bears...
We seen a few bears driving in from the airport. There are lots out here. According to our interpreter they are a problem in petropavlosk where they kill a few people every year in the city. Their numbers are very high.
The typical way that they hunt bears is to shoot a moose and then use the carcass as bait. It works really well once the bears start hitting it. Only problem is these bears are really big and they will polish it off pretty fast. Another problem is if your guide doesn’t know exactly where the carcass is lol. We spent 1 morning ( about 3 hours) searching a clearing where they shot a moose before we got there and had seen a good 8 footer. By searching I mean walking through neck high grass and willows looking for a moose carcass that has definitely been claimed by multiple brown bears.. right at this time i really regretted bringing my gunwerks 1000 yard out of the box rifle, Instead of my 416 lol. Lucky we didn’t die, or get charged and I was ok with not seeing a bear that am. We seen a few going from moose spot to moose spot but it’s hard to judge a bear when you only have a couple of seconds. In my opinion, you can do a combo moose bear hunt. But don’t expect a monster bear. For 1, those ones are in a different area. Those ones are more coastal. The size of the bears varies like it does here between a grizzly and kodiak. I was lucky enough to get a grizzly in bc last year before it closed so I was holding out for a big big one. And by holding out, I mean I will be coming back in the spring for one. In the spring you have more time to view and to judge them. In the fall it’s shoot first and judge him when he’s dead on the ground. Not my cup of tea.

So that ends to where I’m at right now. I left early, when my Spanish buddy was done. Customers were calling and I figured I could head back and get a few extra jobs done and go to the aleutians in 2 weeks. Well apparently I need a permit that I can’t leave the country without. Sooo I’m in Moscow exploring the city as we speak. Permit will be here tomorrow and then I start the journey home.

I will be back for a moose
And I will be back in the spring for a bear

I have partnered up with the outfitters here, and I am going to be there Canadian rep. So if anyone wants to come here, I’d be happy to help you out.

If you're in Moscow there is an aviation museum I have always dreamed about going to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent...r_Force_Museum

If you Google Central Airforce Museum Moscow it pops up, apparently an hour train ride from downtown Moscow.


Awesome hunt! Sounds like a blast! Were other people helicopter hunting around you? That would drive me nuts.

Crap, it closes in an hour
👎
There was only the one group hunting from the helicopters. The animals head for the spruce when they hear them I guess

Great story!

Have this aspiration to get out there, "The Valley Of The Smokes" comes to mind when you mention monster bears.

BTW someone forgot to tell them komrads not to buy a cummins older than a 01 gen2 ...lol


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Great story. Thanks for sharing.

Awesome MM, what an adventure to take on.

Thanks for sharing