Fine. This is fine. Whatever.
I repeated this to myself over and over, not really believing it, as I marched up 3000 in feet in elevation over three miles, through a downpour and muddy, thick brush, then into an alpine tundra where every rock was slick and the wind was blowing so hard my eyes were watering.
And did I mention that we were in grizzly bear country? Or that the meniscus in my left knee is all torn up? Well, there was that, too.
Welcome to willow ptarmigan hunting in Alaska. Welcome to the finale of my grand adventure, the grouse grand slam.
Some of you may know that I have been on a quest to hunt and eat every small game animal with a season and a bag limit from the Arctic to the Rio Grande. Along that way, I have completed the quail slam as well as the squirrel slam — I believe I am one of three humans to accomplish this odd feat — have shot most of the rabbits and waterfowl, and all the other upland birds save the Himalayan snowcock, a weird asterisk on the slam because they were planted in Nevada only a few decades ago.
I came to Alaska to finish the grouse slam because, well, that’s the easiest way to get the willow and the rock ptarmigan; I’d shot white-tailed ptarmigan in Colorado some years back. (Here’s the story of that crazy hunt.)
Grouse are North America’s native chickens. And there’s one for each habitat. Ruffed grouse for the regular deciduous forests of the East and West. Sage grouse for the Great Basin. Sharp-tailed grouse and prairie chickens for the Great Plains. Dusky grouse for the great mountains of the West. Sooty grouse for the wet mountains of the Pacific Coast. Spruce grouse for the boreal forest. Chachalacas for the jungles. Quail for the other hot places of the world.
Ptarmigan? Ptarmigan are for the cold places. Either high up beyond the treeline, or so far north trees cannot grow larger than you. Willow ptarmigan like these alpine meadows, where the willow “trees” stand chest high. Rock ptarmigan prefer the scree and barren hillsides, like ice-loving chukars. White-tailed ptarmigan stand above them all, at the tops of the mountains.
None are overly challenging to kill. They haven’t read the memo that people have bang sticks that spray fire, and travel with compliant wolves. Many times they fail even to fly away, merely waddling semi-quickly in the opposite direction. Even the fliers are no top guns, lacking the outright speed of a sharpie or the aerobatics of a bobwhite.
No, the trick to killing ptarmigan is finding ptarmigan.
The white-tailed ptarmigan we found milling about at 13,500 feet, just short of that mountain’s peak. It was a wham-bam thing, too: We found birds within 20 minutes of getting in the zone. Then we hunted for hours before we found more.
The rock ptarmigan were similar. I’d flown into Fairbanks to meet my friend Tyler Webster, who is also on the Grouse Quest. We had a local guy set to show us the ropes, but alas, he fell ill with covid. (He’s feeling better now.) But he told us where to look.
Tundra.
We were about 65 miles south of the Arctic Circle. And it was amazing! I’d seen pictures and movies and such, but nothing beats being there. The spongy muskeg, the miraculous diversity of plants, almost none taller than your ankle. Berries everywhere, a heady cocktail of crowberries, lingonberries and blueberries.
And wind. So much wind. Too much in the first spot we looked. It was blowing 30 miles an hour steadily. The second spot was calmer, but alas, occupied.
Caribou season had opened up the week before, and there were still tons of hunters tooling around the tundra in four-wheelers, which tears up the ground — from what I understand, tears that can take many years to heal. I suppose it’s legal, and unless you can walk 20 miles in a day, you won’t cover ground without it.
Tyler and I can, however, walk 20 miles a day if we have to. So we decided to get out and give it a go anyway.
That’s when a covey of rock ptarmigan ran across the road.
Uh, OK then. Let’s get those!
So we got out of the car — Tyler didn’t even let his dogs Rusty and Bo out — kinda sorta walked right at the birds, who didn’t seem inclined to fly, and, well, shot ‘em.
This is the part where I get hate mail from people with suede patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets. (Talkin’ to you, Gray’s Sporting Journal.) Yes, I know it’s more fun and challenging to shoot birds on the wing. It’s called wingshooting for a reason.
But a) I am a cook and my ultimate goal is to eat said animals, and b) we could in theory walk 20 miles and not find another covey. So it’s crazy to not take the bird in hand. Especially since we were scheduled to hunt spruce grouse the following day, then drive all the next day to get into willow ptarmigan country.
So yeah, we took those rock ptarmigan to ground pound town. The skillet shot, as they say in Texas.
Feeling appropriately shamed, we then walked the tundra for several hours looking for more, this time with Bo and Rusty. And of course we didn’t find any. But it was ethereal hiking the tundra. I stopped several times to pick lingonberries, which have been an obsession of mine for years — they are integral to Scandinavian cuisine and a fiendishly difficult to buy.
The next day was all about the boreal forest.
And what a day! Tyler and I spent hours wandering around looking for spruce grouse, picking mushrooms and berries. So many cool mushrooms, lots of lingonberries, rose hips, highbush cranberries and some teeny raspberries, too.
And yes, we did end up getting a few spruce grouse as well. Anyone who has ever hunted them or seen the TV show “Alone” will know that “hunting” is a loose term with a bird best known as a fool hen.
After that, it was a long slog down to Sterling, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula, more than nine hours to the south.
Tyler had driven to Alaska all the way from North Dakota, and had hunted with the guys we were set up with before I had arrived in Alaska. He’d already shot his willow ptarmigan, and warned me it would not be like the rock ptarmigan.
His hunt was so hard he’d fallen and cracked at least one rib. So Tyler would fish for coho salmon while I climbed the mountain.
The next day arrived me early. Eric Locker and Evan Withrow would be my companions. Eric is 32, Evan 28. I am 52. So I knew right away this would be not-so-fun. Alpine hunting is, largely, a pursuit of the young. The climbs, the weather changes, the sheer pain of it all will leave scars.
I am not unfit for my age, but I’m still not what I once was. And there’s the matter of my left knee, which has been hurting for 14 months. I had a cortisone shot earlier this summer, but the injury flared up again a few days before my flight. Perfect.
This gets us to where we began, slogging uphill, trying to not slow down the boys, trying to not pop my knee out of its socket. In the small mercies department, I was never winded the whole day, so my regular life of walking, running, rowing and cycling was serving me well.
After an hour we stopped to get ready to hunt. Eric said there might be a “road bird” between where we were going to seriously hunt and there, so he suggested I get some shells ready. For the record, the road was about one rock wide. It reminded me of the back way into Mordor, although I never did see Gollum about. But then, he is tricksy.
I was already toting Tinkerbelle, my trusty companion through this entire quest; she is a 20-gauge Franchi Veloce over-and-under. And even though she weighs less than six pounds, it’s a thing to carry her in one hand and a trekking pole in the other.
This leads me to a few gear notes:
I cannot say enough how much that trekking pole helped! I’d never used one, and it saved my knee.
Second, next time I’ll skip the regular upland vest for a backpack that has a gun scabbard. Not having to worry about the shotgun either in my hand or slipping off my shoulder would have been a godsend.
Do. Not. Wear. Suspenders. My rain paints, nice as they were, had suspenders that constantly slipped off my shoulders. I’m losing them and using a belt next time.
Gaiters are a must. There was so much water, and many little creeks to cross, that without them my boots would have gotten soaked and I would not have been a happy camper.
Bring a filtering water bottle so you can dip it in the stream and not get giardia. There’s simply no way to bring enough water otherwise.
At any rate, there was no road bird. So another hour of schlepping went by. We were all tired — Eric and Evan call this “Type II Fun,” the sort of thing that sucks when you’re doing it, but when it’s over you’re glad you made the effort.
Finally we reached The Promised Land, where willow ptarmigan abounded and life was good. Or something like that. I’m not sure because I think I was hallucinating at the time.
And then I saw it. Shining in the sun. A mushroom! And damned if it didn’t look like a porcino, a Boletus edulis. On closer inspection, it wasn’t. Growing among lichens and crowberries and lingonberries, this puppy had a peach-colored cap and ever so slightly stained blue. I still don’t know what it is, so if you do, let me know.
I was absorbed in this mushroom (and taking a break) when I caught shouting on the wind. Evan, a mountain goat in human form, had strode onwards, and his dog Junie had smelled ptarmigan!
Evan was about 300 yards away, so I suspected I would not get there in time before the birds flushed, but I hurried anyway. And sure enough, when Eric’s dog Maverick got into the act, he pushed too close and the birds flushed. I had an iffy shot going away over Evan’s head that I did not take. It was early, and eager as I was, shooting over someone is not good form. We’d find more.
Soon, as it happened.
We were all watching where those birds flew when Eric spotted a shape about 200 yards away, slightly below us among the willows. A ptarmigan! Game on.
We inched closer, dogs holding back. Ptarmigan are rarely alone, so we could get a real covey flush here. I took the left side, where the sentry bird was standing just outside the willows. I put bushes between me and him — it was a big rooster bird — until I was in range.
I shouted out something like, “brace yourself, fool!” both because it was the first thing to come to mind, and to maybe get the ptarmigan to flush, but alas, he had not seen that movie and stood there. So he took some bismuth to the dome.
And just like that, the grand slam of grouse was over. Had we trudged home after that I would say it would have been super mega anti-climactic, but we continued to hunt for a few hours. We all got birds — on the wing, this time — and I ended up with four.
It took a while to sink in. Hell, it’s still settling in. I don’t know how many people have done the grouse slam. Has to be hundreds, I should think. But I’m now one of them.
It’s not just checking species off a list that has me on cloud nine. It’s that doing something like this — especially combined with the other small game animals I pursue — has taken me all over the continent. I see glorious, wondrous places. I meet legions of generous, amiable fellow hunters.
And I get to savor the flavor of a class of animals that is as diverse as any.
Ptarmigan are, at their lightest, the color of a chicken thigh, and can turn damn near purple when old and eating lichen. They can be strong-tasting. Distinctive. But catch them eating good things, things we too can eat, and you have a wonderful meal in the making.
As a postscript, when I returned, I spent more than four hours plucking and gutting the dozen birds I brought home; plucking upland birds is a delicate process. I owe it to the birds and myself to use as much as I can of them, to waste as little as possible.
This process also gives me insight into what comes next, the cooking. Each species had different things in its crop. The rock ptarmigan were stuffed with crow- and blueberries. The spruce grouse, spruce needles and lingonberries. And the willow? Leaves, mushrooms, lingonberries and crowberries.
That’ll give me something to work with while I plan my next adventure. And nurse my knee.
What’s Next
I still have a few critters to chase to finish the Small Game Slam:
The rails: sora, clapper, Virginia and king
The purple gallinule
About 11 waterfowl species, mostly sea ducks and the whistling ducks
The Arctic hare, the Alaska hare and the swamp rabbit
The Himalayan snowcock
Great post - I had the pleasure of eating Arctic Ptarmigan somewhat recently and it may be been the best bird I’ve ever had
Great read this morning! Thanks! I would enjoy learning how your future hunts turn out.