So Joyce drew the holy grail for this winter. A Delta Bison Bull.

If anyone has experience with this hunt or any helpful intel please feel free to share. PM's are fine if you want to keep the pissy shit that seems to happen on all these threads anymore to a minimum.

Cheers
Jim

No from me.

Good luck on your hunt. I would love to do that some day.

My friend that works at fort Greely is always sending me pictures of them.

my brother drew one a couple years ago he killed a super bull with his bow. His total hunt lasted 4 hours!

Bring lots of help. Getting your bison is the easy part. We have a bison hunt in northern Alberta and people are constantly amazed how big the critters are. throw in a couple of feet of snow and -30, things get interesting.

Grizz

Lived there 12 years if any.of my.friends are still there they can help .I.Have been gone 8 years .I.use to see them all the time .I.pm you some leads they live out there where they are .Give me a holler I.know alot about that hunt and the buffalo there .

I hunted there a few years back.
I tried the Buffalo Range first. Saw a herd early in the morning and put a stalk on. I was just getting into position and someone else drives right into the clearing. No more buffalo.
I then went private land. Killed a great bull before noon on the first day hunting their property.
The property owner said in 25 years I was her first! Blushing I asked, excuse me. She said in 25 years of hosting hunters I was the first guy stupid enough to hunt buffalo by myself. She was right, I started butchering before noon and it was a very dark 9:00 PM before I finished cutting. Handling that mass by yourself is very difficult. Take some help, the more the merrier. I can do a moose in a few hours, but they have long legs that you can get leverage.

quote:

Take some help, the more the merrier.

I have a knife.

Last year my best friend drew a bull tag. We hunted8 days in the fall then 11 days in Feb.
They are the hardest to hunt animals I've ever been in on hunting. They seem to have all the hearing of a moose , nose of a bear and eyes of a sheep. And there is almost always a Bunch of them. The lone bison is Very rare.
We saw a couple guys loose their animals due to wrong sex taken. Which lead to a fine . Anyone that didn't report a wrong sex taken had Real troubles!!!
We found that the bulls stayed in the center of the groups. Surrounded by cows.
They use moose as sentries. And when the moose get nervous from hunters stalking the bison and drift out into the open looking back. The bison spook and don't stop till they are back in thick timber.
One of the most frustrating things is putting in a perfect stalk up to 400 yards or more . Where we were viewing them , trying to determine sex and figure our final stalk. Strong breeze or more often a strong wind in our face. Then some yayhoo comes into the area, totally on the wrong side of the wind, spreading their scent all over the place . ZOOM all the bison take off like their ads is on fire. It's amazing how clueless of common hunting practices some people are !!!
We got so we could figure out the bison somewhat. But we couldn't figure out what other people/hunters were doing. Just amazingly frustrating.
If you go public land, you will want to get your base permits.

We stayed with some good friends in Delta so we didn't have hotel or lodge costs and didn't have to bring a camper/trailer.
I honestly think that a fat bike is the best vehicle for access and travel at the Panoramic and Gerstal fields. Quiet , easy to travel at 6- 10 mph. Doesn't create exhaust.
I also think that setting up a blind and leaving it in place is a good game plan. In the fall there were lots of bison in the Gerstal and Panoramic areas but in Feb there was very little fresh bison sign there.

The bison hunt of years past where the hunters strolled up to a small herd and shot one is rarely how it works nowadays. Weather in the fall was windy. In Feb it was 30 below and colder wind chill most mornings.
The toughest part we found was sex id.

quote:

Originally posted by Cold Trigger Finger:
We stayed with some good friends in Delta so we didn't have hotel or lodge costs and didn't have to bring a camper/trailer.
I honestly think that a fat bike is the best vehicle for access and travel at the Panoramic and Gerstal fields. Quiet , easy to travel at 6- 10 mph. Doesn't create exhaust.
I also think that setting up a blind and leaving it in place is a good game plan. In the fall there were lots of bison in the Gerstal and Panoramic areas but in Feb there was very little fresh bison sign there.

The bison hunt of years past where the hunters strolled up to a small herd and shot one is rarely how it works nowadays. Weather in the fall was windy. In Feb it was 30 below and colder wind chill most mornings.
The toughest part we found was sex id.

Thanks for the two posts. Others I have talked with echo'd your assessment. I've only talked to one guy who had an "easy" hunt of it and that was on private land.

The private land is so much nicer . But we found the rates and exclusivity varied a lot from ranch to ranch. ADF+G has names and numbers of most of the ranchers that allow bison hunting. The herd is growing as of last year at least . And we definately felt that ADFG wanted everyone to fill their tags. They freely shared all the knowledge they could get on herd movements.