chonk34
AH veteran
While my dad and I were getting the taxidermy done from our 2019 South Africa trip, we noticed that that Yuri, the taxidermist, had a lot of hunting pictures on his wall of large brown bears. A Russian native, Yuri told us that he took clients on hunts in Kamchatka from time to time.
My dad kept in contact with him, and last year Yuri told him that a client had canceled his hunt, forfeiting their deposit, and that we could take the hunt at a much-reduced price. Prices for Alaskan bears and full-priced Russian bears are well out of my budget, but this deal was too good to pass up and made a bear hunt accessible for me. I was a little concerned about the risks of traveling to Russia, but we heard several stories of hunters who had done so recently without issue, so we decided to go ahead with the plan. We did the preliminary work of getting our visas and plane tickets, and the trip was scheduled for early April, when the bears are starting to wake up from hibernation and haven’t rubbed all their winter fur off yet.
Because of the current world situation I wasn’t able to fly west to arrive at my destination, just a few time zones away, so I had to fly most of the way around the world to the east, from Boise to Seattle to Istanbul to Moscow to Kamchatka. It worked out to about 24 hours of flying and 24 hours of layovers. My dad was flying from Romania, so his journey was a little shorter. We met up in Istanbul and traveled to Moscow, where we were to stay the night before catching our connecting flight to Kamchatka.
We got through passport control, although I have no idea what the paperwork I signed meant. Because electronic funds transfers to Russia are blocked at the moment, we were carrying a fair amount of cash on us. Yuri’s son-in-law met us at the airport and took us to our hotel. On the way there he turned down a very foggy abandoned road in the woods that looked like exactly the place you would take a couple of Americans if you wanted to steal all their money and dump their bodies, but eventually the road re-entered civilization and we arrived at the hotel without being robbed and murdered. We met Yuri at the airport the next morning and flew to Kamchatka. Yuri is a fireball of a personality, and ran all around the airport, jumping lines, negotiating with the workers, and dragging us along with him on his wild escapades.
At Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky airport some police met us and asked us basically all the questions you get asked on your visa application – where you were born, where you’re from, what you’re doing in Russia, who you know in Russia, where you work, whether you have any military or government service, and things like that. The flight to Palana, the small town near our hunting area, was not flying, so we had to stay the night in Yelizovo. We went to dinner at a tavern done up to look like a castle and had borscht. The next day we boarded the oldest Yakovlev Yak-40 in the airline’s fleet, still bearing its 1960s upholstery, and flew a couple of hours north to Palana, where we would meet our guides and travel to the hunting area.
In Palana we were met by the hunting guide, Alexander. We changed into hunting clothes in his garage, bought some supplies at a convenience store, and drove an hour south in his truck to meet up with Vladimir, his assistant, and the snowmobiles. The snow was so deep that dogsleds, or their modern snowmobile-towed equivalent, were the best available form of transportation.
We loaded up in the sleds and headed for camp. It took about two hours to get to the hunting camp, a series of cabins in the wilderness. There was a dining cabin, a sauna/bath cabin, living quarters for the guides and hunters, an outhouse, and some other structures.
Hunting was also done from snowmobiles. My dad and I would get in the sleds and the guides would drive the snowmobiles. Yuri was supposed to be traveling with us during the hunting, but one of the snowmobiles had broken down on the way to camp and it was too much of a bother to ride double in one of the sleds, so he only went out with us on the first day of hunting. Most of the rest of the time my dad rode behind Alexander and I rode behind Vladimir. We became used to “our” sleds and grumbled a little when situations called for us to switch.
To hunt we rode around in the valleys and looked for bear tracks, occasionally stopping to use our binoculars on the hillsides to see if there were bears up high. On the first day of hunting we saw a female bear with a cub, and my dad spotted a bear in the trees that was deemed too small to stalk in on. Still, it was encouraging that we’d already seen several bears and could hopefully see more bears as time went on and more bears came out of hibernation and started moving around.
My dad kept in contact with him, and last year Yuri told him that a client had canceled his hunt, forfeiting their deposit, and that we could take the hunt at a much-reduced price. Prices for Alaskan bears and full-priced Russian bears are well out of my budget, but this deal was too good to pass up and made a bear hunt accessible for me. I was a little concerned about the risks of traveling to Russia, but we heard several stories of hunters who had done so recently without issue, so we decided to go ahead with the plan. We did the preliminary work of getting our visas and plane tickets, and the trip was scheduled for early April, when the bears are starting to wake up from hibernation and haven’t rubbed all their winter fur off yet.
Because of the current world situation I wasn’t able to fly west to arrive at my destination, just a few time zones away, so I had to fly most of the way around the world to the east, from Boise to Seattle to Istanbul to Moscow to Kamchatka. It worked out to about 24 hours of flying and 24 hours of layovers. My dad was flying from Romania, so his journey was a little shorter. We met up in Istanbul and traveled to Moscow, where we were to stay the night before catching our connecting flight to Kamchatka.
We got through passport control, although I have no idea what the paperwork I signed meant. Because electronic funds transfers to Russia are blocked at the moment, we were carrying a fair amount of cash on us. Yuri’s son-in-law met us at the airport and took us to our hotel. On the way there he turned down a very foggy abandoned road in the woods that looked like exactly the place you would take a couple of Americans if you wanted to steal all their money and dump their bodies, but eventually the road re-entered civilization and we arrived at the hotel without being robbed and murdered. We met Yuri at the airport the next morning and flew to Kamchatka. Yuri is a fireball of a personality, and ran all around the airport, jumping lines, negotiating with the workers, and dragging us along with him on his wild escapades.
At Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky airport some police met us and asked us basically all the questions you get asked on your visa application – where you were born, where you’re from, what you’re doing in Russia, who you know in Russia, where you work, whether you have any military or government service, and things like that. The flight to Palana, the small town near our hunting area, was not flying, so we had to stay the night in Yelizovo. We went to dinner at a tavern done up to look like a castle and had borscht. The next day we boarded the oldest Yakovlev Yak-40 in the airline’s fleet, still bearing its 1960s upholstery, and flew a couple of hours north to Palana, where we would meet our guides and travel to the hunting area.
In Palana we were met by the hunting guide, Alexander. We changed into hunting clothes in his garage, bought some supplies at a convenience store, and drove an hour south in his truck to meet up with Vladimir, his assistant, and the snowmobiles. The snow was so deep that dogsleds, or their modern snowmobile-towed equivalent, were the best available form of transportation.
We loaded up in the sleds and headed for camp. It took about two hours to get to the hunting camp, a series of cabins in the wilderness. There was a dining cabin, a sauna/bath cabin, living quarters for the guides and hunters, an outhouse, and some other structures.
Hunting was also done from snowmobiles. My dad and I would get in the sleds and the guides would drive the snowmobiles. Yuri was supposed to be traveling with us during the hunting, but one of the snowmobiles had broken down on the way to camp and it was too much of a bother to ride double in one of the sleds, so he only went out with us on the first day of hunting. Most of the rest of the time my dad rode behind Alexander and I rode behind Vladimir. We became used to “our” sleds and grumbled a little when situations called for us to switch.
To hunt we rode around in the valleys and looked for bear tracks, occasionally stopping to use our binoculars on the hillsides to see if there were bears up high. On the first day of hunting we saw a female bear with a cub, and my dad spotted a bear in the trees that was deemed too small to stalk in on. Still, it was encouraging that we’d already seen several bears and could hopefully see more bears as time went on and more bears came out of hibernation and started moving around.
