I knew where the biggest brown bears in the world were: Kamchatka. I never really thought I’d get over there, but after a very frustrating experience with a grizzly outfitter in Alaska, I decided the next year would be a year for bears. So I booked Canada, Croatia, and Kamchatka — all in one year.

Getting there was going to be a whole different deal. Russia does not permit flying from Alaska, so that meant going the long way around. Getting to Moscow was probably 11 or 12 hours of flight time by itself. From there it was another nine-hour flight to the Kamchatka Peninsula.

When I landed, I was pulled aside and questioned by Russian security officers. I didn’t know who they were at the time, and gave them a little grief. Later, when my outfitter picked me up, he told me they were the KGB.

My outfitter’s two assistant guides were brothers, and their mother had just died, so they needed to get out of camp fast. Instead of driving, which would have been a long ride, we took a helicopter into camp. It wasn’t a fancy helicopter. It looked like a kit-copter. We had to weigh our gear before getting on and were somewhere close to 200 lbs. overweight. The pilot just looked at it, shrugged, and started loading our stuff.

The flight was spectacular. Kamchatka has a lot of volcanoes, and I saw a bunch of them under a clear sky as we flew over the forest. We skirted a military area, and it was a little spooky as a Russian helicopter escorted us along the boundary. We got to camp. The boys unloaded everything and we settled into some cabins way out in the middle of nowhere, then the boys flew out. It was just me and the lead outfitter until those boys could get back. As it turned out, it would be about four days before we’d see another human again.

I didn’t bring hunting boots. I brought waders and Muddy boots. I knew there was a lot of water. I had been told repeatedly there would be some deep-water crossings, and on the first day I learned real quick that my heavyweight waders were going to be no good for hiking. We did put a rubber raft into the river, but that didn’t last long. The outfitter ran it into a deadfall and put a hole in it. Only the boys apparently knew where the patch kit was, so we drove back upriver with me double-wrapping a rope around my hand to hold the punctured bow up so it didn’t flood and sink. That meant we were on foot for the rest of the week. That week I put 40 miles on those Muddy boots.

We saw bears everywhere, all the time. We walked through fields full of blueberries, and those blueberry bushes grew on dirt mounds. The tops of the bushes were chest-high and we were weaving in and out of them, looking out across a field. It was really spooky, because when we saw a bear in the field, all you could see was the top of its back, like a shark moving through water. It was one of the wildest, most nervous feelings you can have, knowing there could be a bear just on the other side of a bush.

We’d see a bear, decide to get closer, and we’d crawl, we’d crouch, we’d try to sneak up. Sometimes the wind would bust us. A lot of times we would get to 50 or even 40 yards before we saw a cub and realized it was a sow. We got close enough to get charged a couple of times. One of them was a boar that we wound up having to fire over its head as it got to 30 yards. Another was a sow with three cubs. As we were approaching, before it charged, the lead guide told me to get the bear spray he had given me ready. I told him that bear spray had been empty so I don’t have it. He pointed at my gun, “Well you better be ready then.”

A few times we’d come across a huge piece of mangled metal, and the outfitter would just say, “Rocket.” He explained that the country would test-fire missiles over the peninsula, intended to land in the ocean, but they wouldn’t make it, so they would fall right there. Every piece of wreckage was some test missile. I did take a few pictures of them. He warned me to be careful, because they might inspect my phone on the way out of the country.

The boys eventually showed up and got the raft fixed, so we were able to put some time back on the river, to the tune of 30 miles by the end of the hunt. Sometimes we’d stop and hike into the interior, exploring fields. I distinctly remember the lead outfitter before we went into some bushy growth about eight feet tall, and he looked at me and said, “Be ready. Very, very dangerous.” And in we would go, Spidey-sense turned up to 11. In fact, I was turned on all week. We had bears in camp, around camp, walking from camp to the river. Everywhere we went, we saw bears. That week I counted over 120 individual brown bears.

I did get to do some fishing. Their salmon run was on, and we caught all varieties of salmon. These Russians would sometimes carefully squeeze the roe from the fish and save it. We’d eat it at supper.

Now, I’m not a big caviar fan, and I’m still not, but it was interesting to see them take such care, putting some roe back in the water to grow into big fish, then carefully place the fish back in the water and off it would go, but they sure loved their caviar. Those boys came back to camp with two cases of vodka, and they sure loved that too. They would do a shot of vodka to celebrate anything — getting back to camp safely, seeing bears, laughing at a joke, celebrating a good meal. Anything for a shot of vodka. They weren’t taking it into the field, but they sure made up for it at night.

We stopped at one point on the river to explore a trail. There was a lot of deadfall, so we were walking along logs. Out of nowhere a bear showed up ahead of us at around 80 yards. I sure didn’t want to fall off that deadfall into the river, but boy, I moved along those logs getting out of there. We essentially ran across the deadfall to get back to land, back to the river, and we hustled out of there.

Another time we were walking along a field and took a trail back to the river. You could smell death. We came up on a dead cub and stood there looking at it, shaking our heads, trying to figure out what we were looking at. I mean, it was clearly a dead bear cub, still intact. The lead guy looked at me and said, “It’s been here a while. There’s no bear around.” I immediately shot a look at him and said, “Bullshit. There are no flies on this bear. This is fresh.” His eyes kind of widened and he realized I was right. We decided to giddyup outta there. We walked 20 paces and found some dead fish that did have flies. Whatever was in there was darn sure still in there, so we grabbed another gear and made tracks.

The next morning was my second-to-last day in camp. The four of us hopped in that raft and went upriver because the salmon were running. Apparently there was some confluence where they kept saying the big bears were. Thankfully those two boys were back, because they were also pretty handy with chainsaws. We had to saw our way through downed trees to get where they wanted to go.

As we were riding along the river there’d be ducks in the water or bears on the river’s edge fishing. We eventually slowed down as the river widened. There was a big gravel bar and a bit of a brush pile on our end of it as we came into this section. I saw him on the far bank. He was jumping in the water after fish, coming back up. I remember looking straight at his head, seeing those really small ears, and I just said flatly, “That’s him.” A big giant pumpkin head with small ears. Huge hump. I knew what I was looking for and he was it.

I asked if we could get to that bit of brush pile on the end of the bar. They said, “No. He’ll spook.” I said, “All right. Well, y’all got to keep this boat steady.” One of the assistant guides hopped out, and the water was just above his knees. I hunkered down and put that gun over the gunwale of the rubber raft, which by this point the patch was starting to give out, so it wasn’t completely firm. I put it on him, ranged him at 90 yards, and absolutely hammered him in the shoulder. He fell in the water, but he still had some go in him. He started crawling out, and as he got his front legs up on the bank I hit him again. That was it.

We motored over to that side of the river, and there he was, floating downstream. We put a rope on him and dragged him to that gravel bar in the middle of the river. It took all we had to get him up there. Then the guides went to work. Two of them were skinning and one boy was working on the paws. I noticed a bear walking through the woods. Eventually this bear came out to the bank. We kept an eye on him and hollered at him, because he clearly wanted to come over and take our bear. He went back in the woods and we went back to skinning. I’m holding a leg, the lead guide is directing the assistant guides, and then I look up and here’s that bear standing on the opposite end of the gravel bar. He had come out of the woods at a different location, swum across the river, and come onto that bar without any of us noticing him or hearing him or anything.

I grabbed my rifle. The lead guide grabbed his .308. One of the assistant guides had an AK-47. It looked like it had a silencer on it, but when I had looked at it up close earlier it didn’t have any baffles in it. It was just a metal tube welded to the end of the barrel. The three of us put a couple of rounds in the air, and that thing finally boogered. We were able to finish our work and get back on the river for camp.

A lot of vodka was put down that night. The next day was spent cleaning up camp, boiling the head, and salting the hide. We loaded up a six-wheeled Argo. The next morning, departure morning, we headed out early in that Argo. It was like a wild take on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. There was no trail. We made a trail. We were seeing bears along the way. At one point the Argo slid down a sidehill. We had to hop out, pull the winch out, and pull it back onto what I can only call a path we intended to go up. We eventually came to a dirt road that we drove for another hour to get to their two waiting Toyota Hiluxes. We were outside a mine, so there was a miner’s office, just like you’d see anywhere — looked like a trailer. The lead outfitter went inside to say hello to these guys while the assistants and I changed into fresh clothes. I saw the outfitter come out with two fellas. One of them is probably the largest human being I’ve ever seen in my life. He was a huge Russian straight out of Rocky IV. He had a crew cut and he was wearing blue and black camo. He shook my hand and my whole hand disappeared. He was a huge mountain of a man. They sat there and had a pretty long conversation, all in Russian. I just laughed and nodded and put in a chew and listened.

Then we took off. This was around midnight. Of course, before we left, to celebrate a successful exit out of the bear woods, we had to have some vodka and of course these fellas had a shot set in the glove box. We’re driving along, and the thing I noticed about the road was that it seemed sandy. I asked about it. Well, it wasn’t sand. It was volcanic ash. It was unbelievable. The whole road, as far as you could see with the headlights, on either side, was covered in ash. It was something else.

We stayed in some beat-up hotel, cooked hot dogs in a pan on an old stove, and went to bed. I think we drove six hours that night, then another four or five hours the next day. We stopped at a gas station to get something to eat. I’m trying to use a translator app. I’m trying to just point. They were nice. They were laughing. They didn’t know what I was saying either, but my outfitter said, “I’ll get you something you’ll like.” Well, it was a pancake rolled up like a burrito, and all that was in it was grilled chicken — a whole piece of chicken, like a whole chicken breast. It wasn’t shredded. It was just a pancake wrap with a piece of chicken. It wasn’t very good. Didn’t have any cheese, hot sauce or anything on it.

We dropped off the assistant guides, and I was dropped off at a hotel “downtown” (no skyscrapers here, it was a Cold War-era port town). I walked around Kamchatka a little bit, in the pouring rain. I then spent the rest of the afternoon drying my clothes out the window. The next day they took me to the airport and I flew back to Moscow.

I had a day there, so I got hooked up with a local tour guide. She took me down to the Opera House, Kremlin, and Lenin’s Tomb. It had a line wrapped the block of Russians waiting to pay their respects. She took me to an old church that women were not allowed inside, telling me the history of it. Then she said, “Let’s take the subway back.”

We went into the subway station, and it was the steepest escalator I’ve ever been on. It was at least three times longer than the biggest escalator I’ve ever seen. It went down and down and down. Those tunnels were had been used as bomb shelters. They were beautiful. No trash. Each station was themed, whether it was about engineers or teachers or athletes.

The next morning I got picked up, helped through customs at the airport, and I was on my way. It was a fantastic trip, both the sheer adventure and culturally. The people were nice. Once I was out of the city, my guide pointed out propaganda billboards supporting the Ukraine war, telling me many people in the country did not support the war. He said they would arrest people who got on the radio or TV and spoke against the war. He said that generally in the country no one supported it, but only in the cities did they support it, because those people believed what the government was telling them. The more he talked about this, the more it reminded me of home. It’s not much different. Country folks don’t trust the government as much as people in the city seem to do.

I loved it, and there were no safety issues as far as getting into Russia. Of course you couldn’t use U.S. dollars or U.S. credit cards. As soon as I landed you couldn’t even go to a money exchange and get rubles, but my translator said, “Do you need rubles?” I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Well, how much do you need?” I said, “I don’t know. How about $1,000 worth?” He said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re not going to need that much.” I think we did an exchange for $300, and I had rubles left over when I left.

If you’re thinking about it, do it. I was very nervous ahead of time. Everyone told me I was crazy or stupid. Once I was out of the city and into Kamchatka, I was pretty much at ease. I was focused on the hunt, on the adventure, on making the most of a very unique experience.