by Bill Heavey
On the other hand, I’m not going to make any best-dressed lists, either. The three hand warmers I taped over my kidneys have already slid down to a crevice in my body which would be accessible only if I took off most of my clothes, and nobody needs to see a grown man in an apricot shirt. The boots, however, are working perfectly. My feet are so warm that they push a little puff of condensation through the outer boot with each step, which instantly turns white in the frigid air, as if my feet are little choo-choo trains.
Finger-numbing cold and nonstop inaction are not the only things that draw people to this festival. The $150,000 figure in the title refers to the worth of the prizes distributed by the Brainerd Jaycees. Apparently, rewarding skill alone makes no more sense in ice fishing than it does in finger painting, because the Jaycees spread the prizes around randomly and liberally. The angler who catches the biggest fish (which will be a 3.71-pound walleye caught by Sara Kitzman of St. Cloud) takes home a Ford F-150 truck. The 100th-place winner (Jason Himmelwright of Apple Valley, Minnesota, for a 1D 2-pound walleye) will pocket $10,000. And the lucky anglers in 20th, 40th, 50th, 101st, 125th, or 150th place each receive a new Polaris ATV. In other words, a rock bass or a perch that would get lost on a dinner roll could be the catch of your life.
The contest is held on a 250-acre section of Gull Lake. To prepare the area, the organizers drill 24,000 fishing holes, each 8 inches in diameter. It’s a process that takes 3 days and massive amounts of Bengay. Thousands of people are out here, some of whom would be pretty hefty naked, let alone wearing five layers of clothing and mammoth Sorel Ice King pac boots, pulling sleds loaded with cases of beer, coolers, portable heaters, radios, lawn chairs, and—in some cases—actual fishing gear. These extra million tons or so cause the ice to sag, which sends lake water gurgling happily up through the holes. In effect, you are walking around in a large, gray Slushie, which within minutes freezes into a topo map of Hell, all knife-sharp ridges and slick hollows. The organizers are overlooking some great possibilities here. A combination three-legged race and EMT-wound-treatment derby would be a surefire way to maintain crowd interest during slow periods.
Proceeds from ticket sales benefit the Confidence Learning Center, a nonprofit organization that helps people with developmental disabilities. Many of us out on the ice appear to be prime candidates for the center. The organizers evidently think so, too, because there are emergency divers from the local rescue squad here, standing around in inch-thick neoprene. I’m sure it’s a prudent idea, insurance-wise. But the only people likely to need their services today are those skinny enough to disappear down an 8-inch hole or fat enough to break through 20 inches of ice.
You have to walk a gauntlet of vendors demonstrating the latest gear to get to the fishing area. For a mere seven grand, you can buy the new Wilcraft amphibious vehicle, which is a little fishing shack on wheels. You drive it to your desired spot, pop the top up, and lower the platform hydraulically to the ice with the push of a button. Drill up to three holes through the guides in the floor and you and a buddy are good to go. Thin ice is a worry of the past because the Wilcraft floats and its tires have a paddle-wheel effect in calm water. When you’re done, park it in the bed of your pickup and drive home. Or just stay out on the ice until it thaws in spring, then paddle home.
Television improves the quality of any experience, and ice fishing is no exception. The Aqua-Vu Quad 360 displays four images on one screen, giving you a 360-degree view beneath the ice, day or night. If you’re watching your pole, you’re going to miss strikes, no matter how good your reflexes. Why? Because many “strikes” are just nibbles, and other times a fish will slurp up your bait so quietly you won’t even know it. Instead, watch the Quad monitor and see exactly how and when the fish takes your bait, vastly increasing hookups. Since you can also see the baits and fish around other anglers’ holes, you may advise them to fish deeper or shallower if they are in danger of succeeding on their own. Used this way, the Quad 360 can pay for itself in increased tournament winnings.
Over by the StrikeMaster ice augers, a big guy with a snarling machine has a crowd around him. It’s Sean Spraungel, world-record holder in power-auger ice drilling. In 2004, Spraungel drilled three holes through a little more than 2 feet of ice in an astounding 8.6 seconds. That was using a machine that ran on nitrous oxide, a somewhat unstable fuel that has a tendency to transform a working engine into flying shrapnel. For that reason, Spraungel is using regular gas in an auger with a modified 110cc chain-saw engine today. But he’s still astoundingly fast, popping out holes as if he were drilling through Styrofoam. He is a seventh-generation stone-mason, 6 feet 7 inches tall and 310 pounds. That size comes in handy during competition, when you have to start with one hand behind your back. He says there are really only two tricky aspects to competitive drilling. One is that the auger is so souped up it pulls the operator down after it bores through the ice. The other is that it’s easy to cut off a foot. He shows me a gouge in the sole of his boot, a close call he suffered in practice. A competition auger is a powerful beast and will chew through whatever it gets close to. I don’t know what his summer job is, but the guy would be any groundhog’s worst nightmare.
Cheers on the Ice
Past the vendors, I need my cell phone to locate Walleye Dan, a local guide who has invited me to fish with his family and friends. He offers me a folding chair, and I skim the ice out of my hole and hook a fathead through the tail. When the noon starter gun sounds, I open the bail and let it fall 42 feet, then crank the reel up a turn.
Within 30 seconds, a strange transformation steals over the crowd. The raucous party atmosphere is gone, replaced by the collective concentration of thousands of anglers, whose consciousness has suddenly narrowed to the 8-inch holes at their feet. Walleye Dan, whose real name is Dan Eigen, has told me to bump my bait against the bottom a couple of times to make the mud puff, then raise it up a foot and give it a jiggle every so often. This is pretty much what every other angler out here is doing, in depths from 15 to 70 feet. The fish, beneficiaries of the most monumental and simultaneous air drop of food since last year, must be stunned. For long minutes, the crowd remains quiet. Then a cheer goes up about 100 yards away, and a man with both hands over his head can be seen lumbering slowly in the direction of the weigh-in station.
Walleye Dan has been ice fishing so many years that he thinks nothing of clearing his hole with his bare hand if a skimmer isn’t within arm’s reach. Then he nonchalantly shakes the hand in the frigid air, the droplets turning to ice even before they reach the ground. His fingernails are cracked and smashed down to the quick from the endless freeze-and-thaw cycles. He hardly seems to notice and asks his wife, Shelley, for another caffeinated soda so that he may further restrict the blood flow to his extremities. He has three children, all of whom are still too intelligent to be out here. Dan meets with more success than most festival participants. In 14 years, he says, he has caught five fish.
We sit on this endless plain of ice, looking like a nomadic herd of anglers who have momentarily stopped and turned our backs to the wind, trying to gather fish before moving on to the next lake. I watch a guy who evidently cannot locate his party. He picks up a snow shovel from his sled, methodically packs up a mound 2 feet high, and climbs it like a watchtower, lord of all he surveys. Not seeing his friends, he climbs down and resumes fishing.
Another man not 10 yards from me has been down on the same knee for half an hour, jigging his bait every 20 seconds. A boy, evidently his son, sits in a folding chair a few feet away and periodically reels up to recharge his glow-bait with a blue penlight, then drops it back to the bottom. The father disregards the commotion around him: somebody jogging by in slow motion with a fish, a woman towing a sled with bratwurst for sale, nearby anglers firing up gas grills to cook burgers and dogs. I call out to him, asking where he’s from. Wisconsin, he tells me, barely turning his head. He and his boy drove down last night, about 400 miles. They’ll fish, spend the night, and drive back
tomorrow.
The hours tick by. Pam, a woman in our extended party, catches a 3-ounce rock bass and heads off to get in the weigh-in line. I check my minnow, which still has a little wriggle left and is untouched by any fish. Soon the gun goes off, signaling the end of the competition. Everyone gathers up their gear, loads their sleds, and begins slogging back to shore.
Almost everyone, that is. After I thank Dan and head off toward my car, I come upon two guys who are still sitting comfortably by their hole, lines in the water, each holding a fresh beverage, steak-scented smoke rising from a mini charcoal grill. I ask if they’ve caught anything. “Not yet,” one says. “But there’s two good hours of fishing before sundown.”
Caribou Heaven, Caribou Hell
I had envisioned all sorts of hardships on my first caribou hunt above the Arctic Circle: cold, exhaustion, being constantly wet, even the frustration that comes when you haven’t seen a ’bou in three days. What I did not come prepared for is being stuck for half a week in a run-down one-room apartment in an Alaskan village with five strange guys watching nonstop reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond. This particular hell is due to the outfitter’s needing to catch up with a weather-induced backlog of hunters awaiting transport into or out of the bush.
I am on this hunt at the invitation of a buddy, David Draper, who works for Cabela’s, and whom I last saw at an ice-fishing festival in Brainerd, Minnesota, where he had taken off most of his clothes in an effort to raise beer money by posing for photographs. (It is a measure of Cabela’s strength that it can dominate the outdoor market with somebody like Draper on the payroll.) At the moment, I’m trying to keep from strangling him. For the last hour, every time the show’s laugh track has gone off, Draper has joined in with a reflexive, mirthless, and identical giggle of his own. If it keeps up, I may have no alternative. He now resembles nothing so much as a recently dissected frog, something dead that nonetheless continues to kick if poked in the right spot. And what makes it worse is that the four other guys, whom I just met, don’t seem to be bothered by it in the least. Which makes me think they are crazy, too.
Crazy in Kotzebue
Truth is, we’ve all veered off the track. Kotzebue, which lies a few miles north of the Arctic Circle and is the jumping-off point for a good chunk of northwest Alaska, is a dreary little village of peeling houses landscaped with old shipping crates and rusting heavy equipment parts. We arrived at 7:30 A.M. three days ago on the early flight from Anchorage, expecting to be out of here and into camp by noon. But a previous stretch of bad weather (even by Alaskan standards) had backed up the hunters ahead of us going in and coming out of the bush. So we are sitting in the outfitter’s rental holding tank, waiting for the word to mount up that never comes. We drink coffee until noon, switch to beer after, and watch one of three channels on satellite TV all day. We fight over the one bed and floor space each night, listen to sled dogs on short ropes 12 feet outside our window bark all night (average bark rate by my watch: 80 times a minute), and eat gummy, insanely overpriced Chinese food in restaurants run by Koreans (don’t ask).
For live entertainment, we wander down to the airstrip to hear the latest horror stories from soggy hunters who can barely restrain themselves from kissing the tarmac as they trip out of single-engine planes. There are two guys from Montana whose pilot took their meat, antlers, and most of their gear on the first flight, promised to be back in two hours, and didn’t return for six days. They were reduced to splitting a can of soup and a few crackers for dinner to save rations. “It poured almost nonstop for three days,” one tells me. “Just buckets of rain. Whenever there was a break, we’d sprint down the beach and back just to try and warm up.” A foursome of hunters from Idaho awaiting their plane on a sandbar got cut off by rising waters, retreating until they ran out of high ground and watched some of their gear float away. Without a satellite phone, they might not have made it. An Alaskan National Guard Black Hawk helicopter was dispatched from Fairbanks, as was a C-130 from Anchorage to refuel the chopper in midair. After picking the men up, the helicopter had to take on fuel a second time in the air before finally making it back to Kotzebue. Even the locals sound impressed by that one.
Seeking a respite from the wind and rain at the strip, I stumble into an outfitter’s gear shed and find two guys from New Jersey who are three days late and still giddy at having made it back intact. They lost all their cached meat to bears, which then showed up each night between 1 and 3 A.M., snuffling around just outside their tent. “Wall of nylon isn’t much security,” the shorter one says. “We’d made trip wires of soda cans with stones in them using fishing line, but that didn’t bother them. My buddy got immune to the fear after a while. He’d just roll over, stick his arm out the flap, and fire a .44 mag in the air. Fifteen seconds later, he’d be snoring again. Me, I was scared s—less. I couldn’t sleep unless it was daytime.” They wish me good luck and hustle off to try to get standby seats on the flight back to Anchorage.
Around noon on the third day we suddenly get the word: There’s a weather window and it’s our turn. There is an ecstatic fumbling for gear, and we hustle down to the airstrip half-dressed. And then, almost before we know it, three planes bearing the six of us are roaring down the runway almost side by side. Bush pilots do not stand on ceremony, nor do they care greatly for instructions from the tower. The name of the game is to move as much cargo as fast as possible because you never know how long the weather will hold.
Half an hour later, we top a ridge and begin angling down toward an uneven gravel bar in the middle of what we are told is the Eli River. “He’s not gonna land there,” I say to myself. We are clearly descending into a field of igneous rocks the size of bowling balls. “He’s not gonna land there.” The aircraft is so packed that I’m carrying my rifle between my knees, and I reposition it so that the barrel will only break my collarbone instead of going through my eye when we crash. I am still chanting my little mantra when we come to a bumpy stop.
The planes dump our gear, roar back into the sky, and are gone almost immediately. Suddenly, the only sound is the wind. We have engaged Northern Trophy Outfitters for transport, food, and camping gear, but nothing else. We are now on our own.
A Caribou Window
We begin ferrying gear through the freezing water and up to a campsite in the stunted trees. Everybody here is from Nebraska but me. Mark Nelsen and Tom Rosdail work with Draper at Cabela’s and have come up on their own dime for a busman’s holiday. Jeff Baldridge is a veterinary meds salesman who has a farmer’s quiet, no-nonsense demeanor and the air of a guy who knows how to put meat on the ground. Steve Freese is a just-retired captain in the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department who plans to hunt and fish his brains out for the rest of his life. He is a heavyset man who moves slowly and deliberately and seems incapable of getting upset about anything less than a triple homicide. All these guys are immensely more likable now that we’re working together to set up camp. Plus, there are a lot of animals to go around.
The western Arctic caribou herd is the biggest in Alaska, nearly half a million animals. They are barren-ground caribou, generally the biggest antlered of the three types found in North America. In the fall they meander down from their summer grounds in the southeast part of the Brooks Range and winter over north of Nome. While the legal season goes for months, the practical season is short. Antlers are still soft at the beginning of August and don’t harden up until September. The bigger bulls in this area wait until the middle of the month to start moving south toward their wintering grounds. By October there is usually too much snow on the ground for a bush plane to land with tundra tires, but not quite enough for skis. What this means is that the effective season for trophy caribou is no more than three weeks, sometimes a month. We’re lucky to be here at all.
I find myself in the unusual position of being the most experienced caribou hunter in camp, having once gone after them in Quebec. What I know is that they are tasty but neither particularly bright nor great rew
arders of hard work. If you’re in an area through which they are migrating, your chances of success are high. But the ancestral travel routes they have to choose from are almost without number, and they make their selection according to criteria known only to themselves. In short, timely local intelligence is everything. When you do get between them and a place they want to go, you’re as likely to shoot one close to camp as 3 miles away, though from the way the Cabela’s boys are talking, it sounds as if they are trending toward the heroic, planning hikes up into the shale foothills and mountains above the tundra that lie along the river.
Because of the delay getting into the bush, and because I was naive enough to plan another trip on the premise that I could choose the days of my arrival and departure, my five-day hunt has now dwindled to two. The others will stay on, but a plane is to pick me up on Wednesday in time to make the evening flight from Kotzebue back to Anchorage. I am more than a little worried about the brevity of the hunt, but there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it now.
Why It’s Called Barren Ground
The next morning, we head out in two groups. Tom, Steve, and I make our way straight up from the dwarf trees into the rolling tundra; the others head north and into the foothills. I thought I had walked tundra on my previous hunt, but the Canadian stuff was asphalt road compared to this. This is boot-sucking, fall-inducing, forward-movement-arresting muck. You start out stepping on the firmer-looking clumps of grass to avoid sinking in the sludge around them. After a few tumbles, however, you realize that the tussocks are a sucker’s bet, floating islands you slide off of. So you seek out the lowest ground first, since that’s where you’ll end up anyway. But even this is a delusion, as the terrain is honeycombed with the hidden trails and burrows of lemmings, voles, and Arctic hares. Every so often you end up thigh-deep in some rodent’s condo. It seems entirely possible to disappear quietly and permanently into the ground while the guy in front of you walks nonchalantly away.