Hunting The Last Frontier

While Cajuns in South Louisiana have always been enamored with hunting the plentiful wildlife in their native state that is called “The Sportsman Paradise,” one family has expanded its horizon over the last several years to go hunting in Alaska. This family, while doing so, sticks to its Cajun traditions while hunting bear and caribou in “The Last Frontier.”
“I go there for the meat because the meat is delicious,” said Mike Rhodes, whose brother Dallas lives in Anchorage. “My brother and I were raised down south in Terrebonne Parish. We were subsistence hunters. I was a trapper, and my dad was a trapper. We were raised eating what we killed.”
Because of this philosophy, Rhodes has won cooking competitions and has come up with a new way of cooking ducks. “With the sows that we killed, I won one of the Smoked Meat Festival contests,” he said. “With the boars, we made Cajun breakfast sausage and Cajun sausage. It’s delicious. It’s like sausage without the casing.”
Rhodes explained that he also cooks his ducks with the bear sausage. “I mix the bear with onions, Cajun sausage seasoning, and an amount of pork, and I stuff my ducks with that. My wife
Lydia asks how come we can’t have a gravy like that all the time.”
The hunts also became a family affair as Rhodes is joined by his daughter Robin. The two, along with Rhodes’ brother Dallas, go hunting bear in an area around Anchorage called Prince William Sound with its College Fjord and Gilbert Glacier. The Rhodes call this area the “daiquiri factory” because of all the ice from the glaciers and icebergs.
“We go all the way to the back and get to the areas that are semi-protected,” said Rhodes. “The black bears come out of their dens in June, and the first thing they do is eat grass. They come down and are almost like a cow. My brother has some bait stations where we put out food for the bears.”
Rhodes over the years has killed three bear. The first was with an archery bow, and the latter two were with a gun. As Rhodes explained, “it’s easier with a gun because of the range.”
He recounted the incident when he killed his latest bear. “My brother, at the same time, had killed a black bear that was over seven-feet, which is a big black bear,” he said. “I was right next to a glacier, and a bear came out at 10:15 that night. I was hunting with my brother’s rifle and hoping that the scope was on. I ended up making a good shot, but you don’t go walk up on a bear that you’ve shot at 10:00 at night by yourself. I went to the beach and waited for my brother, his wife Tina, and Robin to come back. We all got to go track where the bear was and located the bear.”
“It was huge,” he continued. “It was 19-years-old, and its teeth were starting to get cracked. The way that bears are measured in Prince William Sound is by the size of the skull. My brother’s measured 19 1/4. We laughed and said that was the biggest one we ever killed, but, then, mine ended up being 20 3/8. If it doesn’t lose too much size, I will make the minimum in the Boone and Crockett record book.”
Rhodes’ daughter Robin killed herself a bear on her first attempt, but it came with a cost. “She and my brother were on the beach, and I was driving the boat,” he stated. “She was using a very large rifle, and the rifle scope cut her. We had to go to the emergency room with her. My daughter is probably one of the toughest women on the planet. Despite having numerous stitches and worrying about her facial features, she was back in the boat a day after that.”
“That next day, I was in my archery stand, and she went with my brother with an even bigger rifle and killed her bear,” he continued. “When I got back in the boat, we had a wonderful moment. She was doing the thumbs up that she had gotten a bear, and I could hardly believe it. I was so happy for her, and she’s got the bear rug at her house in Baton Rouge.”
All of the bear hunts, according to Rhodes, end the same way. “All of the ice is fresh water and crystal clear,” he commented. “We’ve never seen ice that clear before. What we do late in the evening after we finish our hunt is take a landing net and try to catch small pieces of ice, and we have our cocktails with 10,000-year-old ice.”
On a couple of occasions, Rhodes and his brother also go hunting caribou at the Arctic Circle. He called the trip on the float plane “unimaginable.” As he described it, “We leave Anchorage and drive up to Fairbanks where we spend the night. We then cross the Yukon River and follow the Alaskan pipeline to an area where a float plane picks us up with all of our gear. We fly three hours north toward the Arctic Circle and land in another area to refuel. It’s then another two-hour sea plane trip over the tundra heading toward the Arctic Circle.”
The caribou hunting, as Rhodes explained, has its challenges from the grizzly bears in the area. “When you shoot a gun over there,” he said, “it’s like ringing a dinner bell because the grizzlies know there’s going to be a gut pile.”
“At night one year, we were sleeping in tents, and some grizzlies came walking around our camp,” he continued. “My brother had a .44 pistol and a .45 automatic. When we sleep in the tent, we sleep with the pistols right next to us. It’s just standard because, if the bear decides to get you, you can’t be fooling around looking for a pistol. You have to have it on you.”
Also, in true Cajun fashion, the Rhodes fish for char, graylings, and other types of fish while at the camp near the Arctic Circle. This creates some other challenges by having to fend off critters from stealing the fish. “I was filleting some char one time, and I had them in pans because I was going to fry some,” Rhodes explained. “This little weasel looking thing that was like a mink looked at me and had one of my filets in its mouth. It looked at me with a look like it wanted to know what I was doing there. I looked at that thing. It looked at me and went in its little hole, and then came two more looking for some more filets.”
The fish-stealing critters represent what Rhodes enjoys the most about the Alaskan hunting expeditions. “We’re constantly awed by the wildlife,” he expressed. “There are seals, eagles by the thousands, and Orca whales that come up at any given time.”
He concluded, “It’s always a privilege to see something like that.”