Alaska Bear Hunt Pt. 1 (Featuring Rorke Denver) | S4E17 | MeatEater

it's not every day a navy seal asks you to teach him something [Music] york likes the tactical position of the spot so when seal officer rorke denver says he wants to learn to hunt every time in the past 14 years i've had a backpack and a gun i've been in georgia and the fact that you're in charge is like a tree i figure i'd better give them the full experience for me that means a backpack hunt for spring black bears in alaska oh grizzly i'm stephen ranella to me hunting isn't only about the pursuit of an animal it's about who we are and what we're made of i live to hunt and hunt to live i am a meat-eater [Music] on this hunt i'm honored to be sharing the mountains with commander rorke denver decorated navy seal author of the fascinating book damn few making the modern seal warrior and one of the stars of the surprise hit film act of valor one of the things i'll miss the most about the tactical environment going into targets is hitting the helicopter the door is open almost all well it's never flight door closed you just spin with your feet dangling while these unbelievable pilots are flying mapping the earth up over trees hillside this is a roller coaster and i were connected through mutual friends because he wanted to learn to hunt as a way of easing out of 13 years of non-stop training and combat i jumped at the opportunity to share some excitement and beauty with someone who has given so much to his country it's my goal to give man experience worthy of his abilities so i'm taking him for spring black bears in alaska to a place where neither of us has ever set foot we're on the southern slope of the alaska range about a hundred miles outside of anchorage and about 75 miles from the nearest paved road hey what's up man steve for a kickoff point we're using the remote lodge of buck bowden of hidden alaska guides who i met way the hell over in pennsylvania it's a nice setup you got man wow it's early june and i've come here fully expecting clouds rain and hordes of mosquitoes but instead all we've seen is pure glorious sunshine it's funny because as much as you've gotten to travel all around the world in like places that people will never go if you work places people don't want to go your first trip to alaska i'm telling you you're getting so far the wrong idea i mean it's just like beautiful it's like beautiful this is the day we just have in this country the most beautiful slice of the pie in the world i mean unbelievable afghanistan actually is one of the most beautiful places we've ever been it sounds counter-intuitive because how dangerous but it is just a landscape utterly primal you know and completely raw you know you're loaded to bear walking around ready for a fight and that place is so raw that you feel like if a tyrannosaurus rex came around the corner you'd just be like yep our plan is to hike out of here in the morning we'll head toward a prominent ridge about six miles away with the alders and willows leafing out visibility at the lower elevations is gonna be pretty rough so it'll be good to get up higher or we'll be able to glass larger swaths of open ground of course every hunting area being unique it's always helpful to get tips from the locals like you generally would say that we want to go up into that country up there and then maybe spill off the other side and go yeah you're going to be more feed into the next valley down yeah head up north northwest which will take you take you up through the lower stuff here you've got about three ridges to get into the alders and the grass they're not up high so you'll be able to you can see go go through all the clearings getting up in there yep so not much time passes between dusk and dawn right now no there's not a there's not much in the way of morning or evening it just just rolls right into i mean there is no night yeah so early mornings and then the last hours of the day if you're gonna hunt you that's gonna be doing it right and then like take your nap during the daytime fish during the day time there you go during the day the bears are gonna pretty pretty much bedded up especially when you've got weather like this so during the day you know waste your time fishing yeah and be rude not to it would be really nice yeah i hope you're focused on bear you start talking about three and four pound rainbows where i grew up that's like dream fish i know it's not a big thing here but that like my mind's gonna be warped looking at that water [Music] it's 5 a.m and time to get moving all righty man all righty talk to you we'll see you in a few days thanks brother so at this point we don't need to be careful about busting through brush to get to a spot because we're just in transit just traveling yeah yeah my goal is just to get up into that high stuff where you can really start to see because i mean the bears aren't that dense right i mean it's like you need to get up where you can look because you need to look at a ton of ground to find one and then go off after them you'll know i'm serious about hunt when i sit down yep we got about a six mile hike to where we'll set up a base camp and it's another absolutely gorgeous day unbelievable [Music] as we climb toward the area that we've pre-selected for a base camp i'm encouraged by a scattering of bear sign along the way there's a nice track at least i know there are some bears working the area that's our first piece of spring bear scat it was kind of greasy in the spring and just like use this vegetation you know no bone fragments yep [Music] camp tree just pitch our stuff here go mess around check out the river yep glass all that junk for a while but then at prime time either be up on those up there or up this this thing right here then take a very short sleep and then come back out at dawn [Music] so [Music] when's the last time you fished well i've been fishing a while now but i mean when i joined the navy i didn't fish for almost six years really can't imagine eight years we were just gone yeah my dad brother and i fished every year multiple times a year as long as i can remember you know you the fisherman oh yeah i'd say that's our favorite thing to do it's all right what'd your dad think when you joined the navy well it's his fault he sent me a book you know by winston churchill and i read that book and knew i wanted to serve i don't think it surprised them i mean i closed that book and called them so i'm joined the military you didn't fish the euphrates or anything i fished through euphrates but we were on a combat patrol and i saw a guy hand lining what looked like carp kind of bottom feeder fish in these ponds i stopped our entire line of march went over my interpreter started talking with them and i said catch it yeah and then i said hey you mind if i take a shot at it he hands me a line and i i catch one in full body armor because i figured look you win for life on that argument yeah somebody says well i caught a 26 inch whatever you but hey i caught one with mortars coming in man [Music] truth be told when we came up on the river we can see that it was all chalky and running high so it's no shocker when we come up empty but as most fishermen will tell you fishing isn't entirely about fish there's an exploratory quality to it as well casting into the water is like asking a question and somehow an empty hook is still a satisfactory answer [Music] after a couple hours as the long evening rolls in we set out for a good vantage point to do some glassing i mean we should set up here for the night and just watch we got a few hours till dark yep [Music] so talk to me a little bit about glassing i mean you know i've learned a good amount of the basic stuff from my snipers being out in the field and trying to identify targets and things like that but as far as hunting is concerned the you know the high points and the low points of being on glass and what we're trying to achieve usually when i sit down i just do like a scan of the real obvious and i'll do a lot of just looking too because you get into this thing and i i'm guilty this is looking far far away all the time and you miss stuff that's just like you miss the one that just standing there looking at you yeah when i start getting down to the solid glass and i want to break it up into strips yeah right run away from us and bears are a little bit different than other stuff because like particularly black bears i mean they just like they pop you know it's just all of a sudden he just steps out in the open and he's just glossy and right you know so it's it's not as nitpicky there's a grizzly that thing looks like a tanker man that's the only thing in these mountains weighs more than you rort it's not what we're looking for oh man there's a blackberry hauling out of that area look at him you scaredy cat is that just 100 knowing that grizz is wrong yeah we just like smelled him as like i'm out you don't want nothing to do with that i think i'll eat them you are not kidding about what you said earlier though like there's no question that that's a bear no question at all in fact we end up seeing a couple that are either too far too small or too spooked by grizzlies to go after still it's exciting to know that there are critters around of course that excitement is tempered by seeing that grizzly it's sobering to think that a navy seal is certainly not the hardiest thing out here [Music] [Music] oh man is this a pretty spot just occurred to me that's kind of like nice about this entire experience is that every time the past probably 14 years i've had a backpack and a gun walking around i've been in charge and the fact that you're charged is like another treat yeah like i just get to hang out enjoy the view and learn and just spend time you know usually you got that burden to make the decisions i'm happy for you to have it well now you know well you know what i'm going through every minute that goes by when i'm not seeing bears yeah [Music] i'm glad rorke is enjoying himself because we go the whole day without seeing a thing [Music] then finally late in the evening rort catches sight of one we got black bear swimming across this lake over here this little pond is he out of the water yeah he just came out of the water he's heading towards the other lake he's just on the edge oh there he is all right let me take a look good eye you know you know why i did that because i feel like we got fixated over there i'm like this is another last night when you were telling me like you know you end up doing these long looks then you don't look short you don't look short and you get burned i was like well let me come back that lake it felt like a little pun it felt like a spot he's having a hell of a good time down there he is boy he's just enjoying this spring man i'll tell you a couple things i'm seeing right now yeah yeah i'm seeing a very light colored muzzle i i could see it eating through the vinyls and i'm seeing a lot of like youngster type behavior right right like the just the sprinty rolly he just doesn't have like an old bear vibe yeah yeah and also he's got a lot of leg he's he's leggy-ish yeah just hadn't thickened up look at this bugger move doing flips down the hill i've never seen that i never seen a bear acting out just like i mean just like wild for such a long time yeah look at that yeah ellie's sliding down i don't know what that is that's just enjoying life that's what i feel like i don't know what to make out of that i'd like to ask somebody clearly this bear is too young and weirdly too happy to even consider bothering with we're just gonna glass this spot out and then if we need to try a new spot in the morning [Music] in the morning we decide to head deeper into the mountains to get a look at some new country our route takes us up past the pond where rorke spotted the small black bear and i'm surprised to see that the area is beaten down with bear trails droppings and excavated lily pad roots from the pond there's a lot more going on here than just a frisky little black bear passing through [Music] there's that trail we saw comes like that and then there's a nice big trail that goes like this down into those alders i don't want to go any deeper than this but i mean we could find a great vantage which might be like up there um somewhere on that ridge we can look down and watch this and then maybe get where we can just see maximum amount of carbon i mean we're here i'm game to stay and see if it bears fruit and then oh grizzly that's who's digging those roots stock on it two of them coming here comes maul i told you someone's been using that area we'll just sit for a while but i don't want to have those come over here and start wanna tear a hole through us we were standing right in their kitchen man i kind of have one let them know we're here but i don't want them to be like oh what's that let's go check it out i don't know how they're gonna respond to the smell [Music] god the unbelievable animals you're clacking his teeth yup they don't like it [Music] oh there they go [Music] seeing those grizzlies tells me that the trail we've been looking at is theirs and it would not be smart for us to hang around until they inevitably return so rorke and i hightail it out of there at this point we're running low on time and i want to return to the most promising area we've found in order to give it a thorough examination it's time to settle in for the long haul this is the best patch of ground we got if you combine accessibility and visibility if a bear was motoring through here we'd have a couple different chances of trying to catch him if he was just hammering through work likes the tactical position of the spot so we can get down into our area quick it is this is like uh the staging area for a good good attack at this point we kind of entered the part of the hunt because i don't really like that much which is the patience part like my asset as a hunter i feel in some ways is just that i like to go you know pounding more ground going going going going glass glass and walking glass and that kind of thing but in this case i just think that the thing to do is try to be in a spot and wait for a bear to come through instead of thinking i'm going to spot one from a million miles away and put the slip on them [Music] we glass non-stop i'm not lying when i tell you we sit in that one place for almost 30 hours [Music] it's killing me resisting the temptation to move but this is our last push and i know it's the best option as time drags on with hardly a break in the daylight to separate one day from the next i think of robert service's line from the cremation of sam mcgee [Music] there are strange things done in the midnight sun but in this case the bizarreness is occurring inside of my increasingly desperate mind i'm almost ready to give up and i'm rehearsing in my head the speech i'm going to have to give rourke about how sometimes hunting is little more than an exercise in managing disappointment when suddenly i catch a glimpse of a black dot moving across a nearby ridge there he is him i don't see him talk me into it again he's out of you with the wind being like it is i would be like well we'll go that way and get our wind different or go that way and get our wind different but that just alder choked hell hole alder choked hell hole we're just gonna kind of push up toward him and hopefully catch mountain some open stuff it's it's very iffy but i want to go now [Music] he's gonna be right on top he's right here he's right here [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: MeatEater

Views: 745,331

Keywords: MeatEater, Meat Eater, Steven Rinella, Steve Rinella, MeatEater Full Episode, MeatEater Season 4 Episode 17, MeatEater Season 4, Monster, Hunting, Hunt, Outdoors, Navy SEAL, Navy SEAL Rorke Denver, Rorke Denver, Alaskan backcountry, black bear, Alaska Range, Alaska Bear Hunt, Alaska Bear Hunt Part 1, Bear Hunting, Black Bear hunting, Black Bear, Alaskan Bear Hunt, Alaskan Bear, Episode 17, ep. 17

Id: a_kRa6NQq1k

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021