Tent, sleeping bag, rifle, bullets, matches. I began to mentally check over the gear I have in the raft, as we are about to shove off for a 10-day moose hunt. The float is supposed to be five solid days of rafting on the Birch Creek, but me and my good buddy Jake Stappler needed time to look for moose.

Usually, I do my moose hunts out of Juneau. But when Jake, a former white water rafting guide, ran the idea of an interior moose hunt by me, I jumped right in.

After a week of packing and months of planning, we were finally setting sail downriver. The next pull out was 50 hours of float time. We decided for the first day or two to put some river behind us so we could get through most the rapids. It also meant if we got an animal, we could get the meat out more quickly.

Birch, aspen and cotton wood trees in full foliage lit up the river. Beyond the trees were miles of meadows packed with different types of moose sing from droppings and tracks to big bull scrapes.

We had a hard time passing up such prime moose habitat, so for the first two days we did a few hours of hunting and a few hours of floating. We were in some good looking "moosey" area with lots of sign, but no moose.

On day three, we really hit the rapids hard. I didn't expect how technical some of the sections would be. But thanks to Jake, we had negotiated rapids with harrowing names like "The Shotgun" and "Home Wrecker."

We had decided to camp in a real good-looking area and to get up early the next morning to do some looking around. We were able to find an area that we both had good feelings about. We set up camp and called it a night.

We awoke at 4:30 a.m. in hopes of hiking to a good vantage point before sunrise. After 40 minutes of sneaking through frozen tundra, we got to a spot that looked pretty good. As soon as we quit moving, it began to get cold. The entire valley had frosted over.

When the sun finally came up, the fog had set in so thick that we could not see more that 100 yards. The fog blanketed the valley for more than three hours by the time we decided to move to an area that looked a little clearer. Just as we rolled over the hillside to see a new meadow, I looked down to the right and see two huge sets of horns sticking out of the brush, moving towards the meadow in front of us.

"Big Bull, right there," I whispered loudly to Jake.

We both ducked down and crept up about 20 yards. The mooses' horns looked like sheets of plywood sticking up. The larger of the two bulls happened to be to be the closest to the river, about 200 yards away. Jake had never tried to shoot a bull. He had the first shot.

Jake squared on the bull and rounded a clean shot at the bull. It was a hit. I followed with a back up shot that put it on the ground. We let out some yells of success. We could not believe the size of the moose.

The other bull stuck around a few more minutes before sensing he probably wasn't in a safe place anymore. We walked up to our kill and measured it. It was 54-inches long, and probably weighed about 1,200 pounds.

After cleaning the moose and getting all the meat in the boat, we set down river for a few hours of floating. Not even five miles downriver we saw a young grizzly come of the brush. He charged toward us about 30 yards before stopping and bolting in the other direction, just as I grabbed my rifle. The bear shook our nerves, but we didn't encounter it or other problems again.

We paddled hard for two and a half days. By 5 p.m., we pulled out. We spent the next few days cutting the meat, and will spend the next year eating it.