Shots Fired

A recent encounter from Caleb who shares what happened to him while on a moose hunt near Swede Lake.

An experience shared by an Ahtna Elder named Agatha recalls her childhood near Horse Creek, where her family routinely heard distant screams while berry picking. She also recounted an incident at their fish camp when her uncle and brother-in-law found their fish wheel intentionally jammed with a large log. While working to clear it, they heard whistling from the shore and turned to find a hairy man crouching on the bank. After shouting at it, the brother-in-law fired a shot into the air, causing the entity and two other unseen companions to crash away through the brush.

An encounter shared by a young man named Austin took place around late June 2023 during a camping and target shooting trip with his friends Michael and Jerry. Around 2:30 AM in the twilight of the Alaskan summer, the group was walking down a dirt access road when they heard massive brush thrashing nearby. Jerry climbed onto a large roadside rock to investigate but immediately scrambled back down in an absolute panic, stating he spotted an enormous black figure that was far too large to be a local black bear.

A 1990 encounter from a fisherman named Timothy, who was 20 years old at the time and completely new to the Alaskan wilderness. While working out of Naknek on a drift boat, the crew had to take a small wooden skiff up the Kvichak River toward Igiugig to retrieve a different fishing net. When the skiff's outboard motor began having mechanical issues, the crew pulled into a small tributary to fix it. Timothy was given a hunting rifle for protection and went to explore the nearby tundra. While sitting on a ridge, Timothy spotted two dark spots about 300 to 400 yards away.

In the early fall in a remote, unspecified Alaskan village, an early-20s woman named Shiloh and her young female cousin take a four-wheeler out into the wide-open tundra to scout local berry patches. While traveling along a horseshoe-shaped trail roughly a mile from the nearest tree line, they spot a hulking, nine-foot-tall figure standing about 50 yards away. The creature begins gently gesturing toward them, casting an immediate psychological trance over Shiloh.

Take a journey back to the early 1974 pipeline boom in the Alaskan bush. While taking a one-week vacation from his strenuous work as a pipeline welding assistant, a welder named Sam accompanies his Native Alaskan friend to a remote area outside of Fort Yukon heading toward Venetie Landing. What was intended to be a relaxing camping trip along the banks of the Yukon River quickly devolves into a terrifying, multi-hour psychological standoff. After nightfall, Sam spots a static set of glowing eyes reflecting the campfire from less than 30 yards away.

In August, an experienced outdoorsman in his mid-60s named Douglas traveled by four-wheeler to the Savage River area where it intersects the Stampede Trail to search for signs of a missing person, Mary Wilson. Arriving near twilight under dense forest canopy, he heard loud, abnormal yelling sounds and witnessed a large silhouette cross the trail.

Around late July in 2017 or 2018, a group of four friends from Colorado—Billy, Chuck, Dennis, and Maria—set up a large two-room blackout tent on a gravel wash in Rainbow Basin, situated at the northwestern corner of Lake Nerka within Wood-Tikchik State Park. After encountering deep, sub-audible grunts that physically vibrated their folding chairs and a series of sharp, crisp whistles that closely shadowed Dennis and Maria during a walk, the group constructed a wide 50-foot perimeter using fine fishing lines rigged with 12-gauge shotgun shell proximity alarms.

Outside of Yakutat within the Tongass National Forest, siblings Tatiana and Nikolai spent five years renovating an inherited family cabin that had been abandoned for two decades. The aggressive encounters escalations began in the second year when Nikolai used a weed-whacker to clear a switchback trail behind the cabin to mitigate bear encounters, unaware that Tatiana's Australian Shepherd had been consistently alerting to a presence hiding on the slope. Three years later, Tatiana returned with her city-dwelling fiance, Robert, and their dog, Roscoe.

In the mid-1970s, a geology student named Alexander and his partner Carol chartered a boat to drop them off for a week-long backcountry expedition up the Nellie Juan River drainage toward Wolverine Creek at Kings Bay on the Kenai Peninsula. On their third day, following heavy storms, they paused on a river gravel bar to construct a small spike camp behind an old tree stump to shield their campfire from the heavy valley winds. While Carol cooked a pot of beans, Alexander moved 50 yards up the slough to survey rock strata.

In late August, a long-distance runner named Russell Bradshaw traveled to the Denali Highway near the MacLaren River to support a caribou hunting group, opting to stay behind in a rental RV. During his routine morning jog toward Paxson, Russell paused about two miles out to observe a flock of ptarmigan get startled from a 50-yard willow slough. Dropping into an S-curve washout, he spotted what he assumed was a large black bear stalking the birds through the six-to-eight-foot tall brush.

In the fall of 2019, just before the pandemic, a local high school senior named Jane was babysitting five young cousins (ranging in age from roughly five to twelve) at a federal HUD housing unit in a remote northwest coastal village of under 500 year-round residents near the Bering Sea. After coming indoors, the two youngest children were caught staring out a bedroom window, giggling and waving at a 'silly man' standing inside the immediate willow and scrub brush lines. Assuming it was an overactive imagination, Jane dismissed the event.

Some thirty years prior to 2023, a Bristol Bay native woman named Julie experienced an encounter as a young girl during a combined moose hunting and salmonberry harvesting trip up the Kvichak River channel with her grandfather (Uppa), father, and uncle. Landing early before sunrise, Julie and her Uppa combed the tundra slopes for blueberries and blackberries.

Over forty-five years prior to 2023, an interior village native named Jonah was breaking winter trail with his six-dog sled team to transport supplies between a major hub and his 100-occupant home community. Armed with a moose rifle, Jonah spent hours packing the deep snow across flat muskeg segments that led into thick timber valleys. As his team negotiated a sharp 'dog-leg' curve on the packed trail, an immense, 350-to-400-pound dead beetle-killed spruce tree was violently hurled down onto the path directly out of the overhanging brush.

In the early-to-mid 1990s, a Bristol Bay native named David spent weeks alone at his grandfather's (Uppa's) cabin situated on the West Channel of the Nushagak River near Keeper Cutoff, due west of Portage Creek. While constructing a log generator shed, David was pelted by pine cones and endured three consecutive nights of heavy thumping on the cabin roof, later clearing off large clumps of uprooted grass and soil with a dip-net pole under the assumption that his brother was playing a prank.