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        WE HAVE ALL SEEN IT...... On the National Geographic, bears coming down to the river fishing salmon and bears at the local dump.

        Let me tell you something about that, those bears have evoluted to that and it is the same bears time after time.

        I am going to tell you something, on this website that is going to make a lot of people reading it uncomfortable. Why? Simply because I know the difference about bear hunting and I am not afraid to say so .

        Don't be brain washed into believing all you have to do is dump out a bunch of doughnuts.
        It makes me smile, when I hear bang on the bait pail and sneak back and see all the bears.

        True, it will work in time, little bears and it better be in a park, dump and other places where bear hunting is not happening and bears have lost the fear of man, but that's not the real world, we wouldn't want to hunt there anyway. If you rely on this type of hunt your odds of getting a trophy bear is diminished drastically. The trophy black bear you deserve is here, let me tell you.......

        DID YOU EVER HEAR OF STOMPING GROUNDS?

        What stomping grounds really means is,it is referring to bear territory. As a bear guide along time ago I found that adult male bears mark their territory by biting and chewing as high up as they can reach and Stepping in exactly the same foot tracks time and time again all the while exerting their weight so as to leave deep impressions walking forward and then backward in the same tracks.

        You guessed it, we have a stand located there.

How do we find all these trophy black bear locations?

        50 years a hunter and trapper

Testimonials

" Tom is anything but lazy, and as close to a pioneer as modern times allow."
        Tom Tabor, Outdoor Writer, MN

From muskrat and weasel trapping at an early age where the anticipation, excitement of tending the traps, like the expectations of a little kid on Christmas morning, it has never changed in the older man of plotting and ambush of the scar face old black bear.

Mark Mosher second generation bear guide hunter & trapper has now has 20 years under his belt.

        How do we find all these trophy black bear hunting locations? They are not come upon easily, but over 50 years of hunting & trapping leads one to various locations. We might be fishing trout, we might be hunting with the cat hounds, animals like people, are attracted to particular locations, it might be an out cropping of rocks, it might be a clump of hugh massive pine bigger than any in the woods, it might be a sunny spot in a meadow clearing, and it seems the tracks of the cat we are following goes right be these massive pines and on investigation there too, is a stomping ground of a trophy black bear and in looking a little further around we find the scat of a raccoon. This information is used at a later time and I don't think I need to elaborate on that. I do want to elaborate a little further, so many times on a good cat crossing somebody gotta build a house or back on a big rutting knoll somebody found a spot and set up camp right smack in the middle of it and of course ruined it because they don't understand hunting.

Extremely Simple Instructions

        You see I am a trapper at heart ! For obvious reasons I am not going to reveal all my secrets to the taking of so many giant trophy black bears.
        It is not necessarily miles deep into the woods where the bear stand is located. It may be just a few hundred yards of a logging road to one of our best bear stands.
                The strategy of location of the bear stand is extremely important, as well as access. You don't want a stand, where every Tom, Dick and Harry will pass by on the way fishing, nor have it, so the prevailing winds blow towards the bears usual access.

        I want to give you an example of a bear hunt at Canoose Camps. We will take Monday for example, now, prior to you coming on your bear hunt, we have talked to you quite a bit and have learned a lot about you and what you could deal with and what you would find to much of a task.

        After breakfast, your bear hunt starts. The first order of the day is sighting in of your guns after the long haul. To many times we missed or wounded and lost a beautiful trophy black bear because of this neglect. And around this time you will also be assigned your guide who is Mark, Andy or myself. Basically, this is decided on the ability of the hunters and the distance to the stands and the difficulty and there are other factors we take in to consideration such as health, fear of heights (we do have ground stands available) to mention a few. Each one of our guides have our own area and direction that we are going in. We have many, many stands and most of the stands we don't hunt them because their not hot at the time of your hunt. These bear stands are monitored very carefully and cautiously from week to week. Now this is where your bear guide comes in very valuable to you because obviously your not here prior to your hunt to do the necessary work to get a trophy black bear.

        Now to continue after sighting in your gun on Monday morning,and being assigned your guide. You may be taken to a particular stand, we have already planned from last week which is due to be hot now. You may need to set up your portable bow stand ( if you are gun hunting there is a platform already built) another reason is to show you the location so that after lunch when it is time to go hunting you'll know exactly where to go and not need to be escorted to the bear stand. This way it saves time as you could see it would take quite a while for a guide to walk in and out of the tree stand which could be about a mile back. Therefore, that means the guide has to walk six miles in and out to get his three hunters in.

        Now you might wonder why we didn't start hunting at the break of day. Which is usually the case for most hunting. Spring Black Bear hunting is a lot more successful if you eliminate the early part of the day, for that matter black bear hunting no matter when it is, is more successful during the latter part of the day.

        Why we don't go on the bear hunt during the early part of the day is because you will most apt to scare the bears already at the bait or in most cases they may be sleeping within a few yards of the bear baits, our bear hunting strategy is to not let the bear know we exist and when he does discover we exist he is usually quite startled, you got to realize we are not hunting tame bears like the dump bears or national geographic show. From understanding bears you can begin to see how easy it can be to take a beautiful trophy black bear and you can also see how easy it would be to bugger the whole situation up.

        If the bear is sleeping, which they do a lot, they also will sit like a dog sometimes an hour at a time for no reason, and supposedly you were there the whole day it would be nearly impossible to remain undetected due to noise, scent, shifting,etc.
It seems that bears are very shy of the day light as a general rule, but when dark comes they certainly become active.

        So therefore, I gave you some of the reasons why we don't hunt in the early part of the day but about 3 o'clock which is just after the main meal, we head out on our bear hunt. The guide will escort you to the stand if needed and quickly get his hunters in hunting as soon as possible. Mind you, this is assuming you want to spend a lot of time in your tree stand as we have 6 to 7 hours of daylight left at this time of year. The whole idea of a bear hunt is to enjoy yourself and if you only want to be on your stand a few hours we will accommodiate you. We are here to help and you are here to enjoy yourself.

        Along about dark your guide will come right into your tree stand if you require. We rather not because we fear of scaring off approaching bears and wising them up for later. We would prefer you to sneak out and we will meet you on the way. The trails are well marked so you wouldn't get off of them, but whatever you wish we will accommodate.

        The guide will take you back to the lodge, where there is the third meal of the day and that buffet style to help yourself, to homemade bread, coldcuts, pies, cookies and maybe a pot of homemade soup and a lot of other goodies to numerous to mention.

        Usually, the guide stations himself where he can hear a gun shot and go to your assistance when you shoot a bear. We try to get your black bear out at night if it hasn't run off. If it has ran off, we will leave the tracking to the next morning in daylight. Don't worry about losing a bear or destroying it be other critters, we haven't lost one yet in 30 years so I don't expect it will happen this year.

Bear Hunt phone 1-800-338-HUNT (4868)

How would I know what the bear hunting
is like elsewhere?

        For the past 10 years we have been involved in the harvest of Morel and other exotic mushrooms. This has taken us deep into the wilderness in all corners of Northwest Canada.

        NOT DRIVING BY LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW Hunting the exotic mustaki or pine mushroom wonder the mountains day after day in the wilderness mountains of British Columbia then move in a hurry maybe 100 miles away to a rumour of another strike, spend a week or so there then move again. Yes we saw black bears.

        Hunting the burns for the famed Morel Mushrooms is where we get to see the country. You see, the morel mushroom grow prolifically the year after the fire in the fringes of the burn and so to does the lush green grass that the spring black bears favours. Did we see dozens of bear a day? Absolutely not. You might see one a week, often times that was far away cause you can see pretty good on a burn.

Where have we been? Allen River (Swan Hills, Alberta) 1999, Incidentally this is the area where the famed Swan Hill grizzly lives we never saw one of them only tracks. Now the burn at Meadow Lake Saskatchewan in 1998, 2000 in Wabasca,(Birch Mountain Alberta), from Fort Smith water base, flown to North West Territories in 2002, then Peace River in 2003, other places in between like LaRonge Sask, Uranium City, Reindeer Lake, Stoney Rapids near NWT.   2007 we flew into Birch Mountains on up to Fort Smith, around Fort McMurray and the Alberta Saskatchewan border but sadly enough we were unable to find sufficient quantities of Morels due to early burns and lack of rain. 2009 we flew in to Charlie Lake northern Alberta next to the Northwest Territories and Uranium City, Saskatchewan. Never saw a bear track, and the fishing wasn't that great either.

That's not all

During the period of 1985 - 1989 we ran a operation in the foot hills of Alberta for Moose, Elk and Black Bear hunting. Hunted Burlin district, Fox Creek, Swan Hills to mention a few. We went out of business when the government increased the license fee from $150.00 to opening bid of $1000.00 per tag and had to buy them in a year in advance. Oh, what was the bear hunting like? Good but the bears tend to be smaller than the east and they have a larger range, it would be nothing to go ten miles from one site to the next.

        Also traveled the Yukon prospecting in the early 80's. We seen quite a few bears especially around the park area. Been Nova Scotia prospecting, very few bears there.

Not to mention the logging expeditions of Northern Alberta. I could ramble on here quite a bit more about expeditions in Ontario & Quebec.

THE BOTTOM LINE IS . . . . .

Black Bear Hunting ....Probably the Best in North America....at Canoose Camps

Reasons are....

1. Bear per square mile is high due to the close cover and feed.

2. The next outfitter near 100 mile away.

3. Setting up a proper hunt location just doesn't happen over night.

4. We are limited by law the amount of hunters per season.