Alaskan brown bear

"I honor that Alaskan brown bear. If it hadn't been for him, I might never have had such a wild and crazy idea."

We were straight in to the action last night as host Jonath an Scott spotted a female Alaskan brown bear, which he promptly nicknamed Blondie, and her three cubs.

It is the smallest of all known carnivores--some 10,000 times smaller than the Alaskan brown bear. Despite its size, it is among the most agile and fearless of animals, as demonstrated when it is pursuing prey or defending its young.

Jim, an Alaskan brown bear, had to be fed blocks of ice to cool him down.

To get his well-known photo of an Alaskan brown bear about to swallow a migrating salmon, Mangelsen waited in the same location all day for more than a week.

For example, there was the arbitrary classification system used by the Boone and Crockett Club; this riflemen's group, cofounded in 1888 by Roosevelt, kept records of big game and decided that any Alaskan brown bear killed within 75 miles (120 km) of tidewater was to be called a brown bear.

"Play believable recordings of honking geese, have a wild game caller on hand, show videos, decorate your shop -- anything to get people in the mood." Indeed, it's not hard to get in the mood upon entering Accokeek Sports, for at the entrance towers a huge Alaskan brown bear, reared up on its hind legs, teeth bared.

I'll admit, as a somewhat traditional rifle/handgun/ muzzleloader hunter, I experienced a few reservations about hunting an Alaskan brown bear with an AR-based rifle.

Alaska offers Dall sheep, moose, caribou, Sitka black-tail, grizzly, Alaskan brown bear, and black bear, along with limited opportunities for Roosevelt's elk, musk oxen, and bison.

The primary load of the .35 Whelen was a 250-grain bullet at around 2,500 fps, though some hunters preferred a 275-grain roundnose, notably a gun writer/guide/rancher named Elmer Keith, who in 1937 stopped a charging Alaskan brown bear with several 275-grain Western Tool & Cooper Works bullets from a .35 Whelen built on a Springfield action.

Hunting the grizzly bear an hunting the Alaskan brown bear are not the same.

This issue also contains a wide variety of bowhunting stories including Gus Congemi's monster Alaskan brown bear that ranks as one of the largest ever taken with a bow.

CUTLINE: (1) A large male Alaskan brown bear stands up for a better view.

Kent Crabtree, a 1975 graduate of Sheldon High School, figures he's lucky to be alive after being charged by an Alaskan Brown bear while doing routine telemetry salmon surveys at the headwaters of the Berners River near Juneau recently.

Realistically, I don't expect to ever take animals that attain the first four of those legendary dimensions, but I did take a 10-foot Alaskan brown bear a long time ago.