Two Pennsylvania men had several close encounters with Alaska brown bears during a May hunt that ended with one of them getting a massive trophy-sized bruin.
Big game hunter John Neilson Jr., 39, of Limerick, Montgomery County, and his guide-packer Frank Barcio, 34, of Erie, enjoyed an incredible adventure that ended with a trophy-size bear on the Alaska Peninsula.
Clients fly to Anchorage and then take a smaller plane to an airport in King Salmon to meet their outfitter Tracy Vrem of Blue Mountain Lodge and guide Aaron Johnson. From there, the outfitter flies their clients to a lodge. The hunters then fly again to their campsite. “It’s an incredibly remote area,” Barcio said about the tundra.
They saw different sizes of bears every day and some got a little too close to their camp for comfort.
On May 9 while setting up their tent, a heavy boar walked within 50 yards of their camp. The guide fired rubber bullets and then a 12 gauge loaded with bird shot to scare the large carnivore back into the wilderness.
“You sleep sorta with one-eye half open,” Neilson said about the bears. “But there’s really not a whole lot you can do, once you’re sleeping.”
On May 11, their guide was eating a sandwich when a sow with cubs started to approach. Fortunately, the bears ran when he yelled at them.
The next day Neilson was returning to camp when he saw a bear walking toward their tent. “I yelled ‘Hey bear’ and threw my rifle over my head, the bear looked at me, I took my scope cover off, racked a shell in the chamber and yelled again ‘Hey bear!’" he wrote in his notes from his adventure. The bear saw him and slowly turned around and started walking away from the tent. "Once I got to the tent I quickly changed out of my waders, put on fresh undies, and then waited outside the tent.”
Barcio said the campsites have heavy steel barrels to put their garbage in and there’s an electric fence around the perimeter of the camp. If a bear touches the fence with its nose, the jolt spooks them. “It’s more of a safety net for us to sleep at night,” he said.
Neilson laughingly said, “I think that bear fence is more a psychological thing for us. I don’t know if it’s going to do much against a bear."
The actual hunt
Neilson shot his bear on May 14. When the men first saw the old bear, they needed to stalk about 500 yards through stream crossings, steep banks and a thick patch of alders. They stopped within 200 yards of the animal that was bedded down in thick cover.
As they waited for it to move, six caribou grazed through the area and fortunately the bear didn’t chase after them. “I think he was just tired, it was a warmer day, the sun was out,” Neilson said. “They literally tiptoed around (the bear) and were watching him and scurried by. It was kind of fun."
The hunters watched the area for about seven hours until the large boar started walking. Neilson fired his .338 Weatherby RPM and hit the bear. He shot three more times just to make sure the large beast was down for good.
“There’s not many places in North America where you go and you’re in their territory,“ Neilson said. “It’s completely a surreal feeling and you get to a different mindset and state where it’s go time. It’s really an adrenaline rush for me. I love it. I think it’s incredible and obviously, it’s nerve-racking. You have so many different emotions flowing through your brain and your body. But when you do get on them and it all comes together, it’s just really a great experience and feeling. It’s fun.”
Some of the habitat is thick where you can’t see far and you never know where the bears are going to be. Barcio said, “You can be 60 yards from a bear at a point and not even know.”
When the hunt happens, you don’t have a choice but to focus on the task at hand.
“You have to get on them and you got to do when you need to do, whether it’s pushing yourself mentally to climb this bank that you normally probably wouldn’t be able to get up unless you have the adrenaline to help push you through it. It’s probably single-handedly one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve done even as a packer learning how to be a guide. Pushing through that to get even on that bear was a lot,” Barcio said.
The next morning, they packed the bear’s hide and head out about two miles to their campsite. The meat isn’t taken as there are concerns about it having trichinosis.Neilson said the main reason the large boars are hunted is for predator control. The large male carnivores can attack the cubs and sows.
“If they see a sow with cubs, they will try to kill them, so the sow will come in heat and they can breed her. Theyalso kill a lot of younger boars, the up-and-comers,” Neilson said."It’s a math game of predator and population control to keep everything healthy from the caribou and moose and it all has an effect.
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“Alaska does a great job at managing tags and how many bears they want out of each unit based on population studies and other animals that are in the area and I think they do a great job at it. So essentially you’re not hunting them for meat, you’re hunting them for predator control in the state."
Neilson, who does land development and property management, has been a serious big game hunter for the past nine years.
“I do quite a bit of hunting. Usually every spring and every fall I go to Canada or Alaska,” he said. “This is my fourth brown bear.”
He’s harvested the other brown bears on Kodiak Island, southeastern Alaska near Cordova and one in interior Alaska.
The bear he shot in May is Neilson’s largest to date. It is similar in size to his Kodiak bear, but the skull is at least an inch bigger. The bear from Kodiak Island measured 27.5 inches and this one is “easily 28 and a half,” he said about its green score.
Skulls need to dry 60 days before they are officially scored for the Boone and Crockett Club record system. For Alaska brown bear, the skull has to measure a minimum of 26 inches for an award and at least 28 inches for all-time recognition.
“It should easily make Boone and Crockett for brown bear,” he said. The bears are skinned where they fall and they don’t have a way to weigh the animal. However, according to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, a large male may weigh up to 1,500 pounds in coastal areas.
The hide measures 9-feet, 9-inches square which is a measurement from its nose to tail and paw to paw of the front legs added together and divided by 2.
Barcio, who is learning a little bit of everything from packing airplanes for the remote areas to judging the size of bears for the hunters, said this was an ideal hunt for his guide training.
“It was a full experience from seeing the bear to having to make a couple of moves, which is intense hiking to get to the next spot, and finally seeing the bear and waiting on him for seven hours and finally watching John (Nelson) drop this bear and the whole pack-out it was everything a bear hunt could be, plus getting a Boone and Crockett all-time bear, so it would be hard for it to be any better,” Barcio said.
Neilson agreed. “It was the complete brown bear experience for me. The outfitter was first class without a doubt,” he said. “This was done all first class and I got the complete, ultimate brown bear experience and I got a Boone and Crockett animal which is an awesome hunt. Definitely an incredible experience. I’m fortunate to be able to do this kind of stuff."
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Neilson preserves the memories of his hunts through taxidermy and is planning to have a full mount made of the bear similar to what he’s had done with his other bears and a variety of other animals like deer, elk, moose, caribou, and sheep, and smaller animals like a coyote and wolverine.
“I try to get them life-sized to give the animals justice. It’s a great display,” he said.
Both men look forward to future hunts and encourage others to visit America’s wild frontier.
“I’d say anyone from Pennsylvania should try to see Alaska one time in their life, at least once,” Barcio said.
Brian Whipkey is the outdoors columnist for USA TODAY Network sites in Pennsylvania. Contact him atbwhipkey@gannett.com and sign up for our weekly Go OutdoorsPA newsletter email on this website's homepage under your login name. Follow him on Facebook@whipkeyoutdoors.
