By Clay Newcomb

October 1st is a day I won’t soon forget. Five years of effort and hustle culminated into my best day of bear hunting. I was bear hunting on private land in Oklahoma for my fifth year. In 2015 I took a 360-pound 20 8/16” bear and was thrilled, however there was a larger bear on the property that I named Batman. He wasn’t just “bigger” he was a lot bigger. He was extremely wary and rarely showed up during the daytime. It's hard to beat an older-age boar's nose. They understand the game. They live long because they come in downwind when they approach the bait – it’s that simple. Or they are 100% nocturnal. They rarely make mistakes. I knew to harvest this bear I was going to have to get extremely lucky, or find a way to be totally scent free - and luck can't be trusted. Your typical “wash your clothes” in scent free soap and spray down is a joke in the bear woods when you’re after a world-class bear.

Baiting bears is simple, but when it comes to the execution of a bear-baiting plan many realize the difficulty and complexity of the task. How much bait do I need? Where do I get it? What do I use? How soon before hunting should I put it out? These questions need answered, and everybody has an opinion.

As seen in the Sep/Oct 2018 Issue of Bear Hunting Magazine!

This was my second trip hunting brown bear. Strangely, I didn’t feel the pressure I did on my first hunt. Overcoming the fear of not bringing home a bear was realized in 2014, but it wasn’t nearly the struggle I thought it would be. The satisfaction of simply being able to hunt The Last Frontier was satisfying in its own accord. In some ways, Alaska is the magical and mysterious place I thought it would be, and it other ways it wasn’t. I was hunting the “mecca” for North American big game, but the region is no respecter of its own reputation. The title didn’t take away the challenges that every hunt brings with it. Time constraints, bad weather, and travel limitations of wilderness hunting are the reality. However, we would overcome all these challenges on this hunt-of-a-lifetime.