Alleged Powerline Pass poacher Logan Baston on the hunt in Montana/Facebook
And the questions unasked
Long, long ago, an already old Alaska adventurer by the name of Dick Griffith met up with a group of Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic racers standing on the east bank of the Skilak River in the Kenai wilderness contemplating how to cross that widely braided flow running high and cold from out of a glacier not far upstream.
As they stood there, Griffith took off his pack, pulled out a lightweight but rather flimsy, one-man Sherpa raft that was the forerunner of today’s high-tech packrafts, started pumping it up, and made an observation about his competition that was destined to life in infamy.
“You young guys eat too much and don’t know nothin’,” Griffith growled.
I have long been cursed by the knowledge of this observation, which comes back to me time and time again upon reading what is printed in the country’s remaining mainstream media, be it local, regional or national.
The know-nothingness in journalism is now so epidemic that it has become scary to read any story covering any topic that you know anything about.
Case in point, accused Powerline Pass poacher Logan Baston, who is reported to have offered this confession to the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) last week:
“Baston, in an interview Thursday, said the moose was a legal-sized bull and in season, but not where he ended up shooting it. He said he was about a mile from where he thought he was when he shot the moose.
“Baston blamed that on a state map with a hunting unit boundary that was hard to read and the fact that, while he normally accessed the unit from the Indian side, this was his first time getting there from the easier Flattop (Mountain) side.
“Baston said he did not go out on Monday planning to illegally shoot a moose.
“‘It’s just a real bummer that it happened,’ he said.”
This was all recorded as true without a question asked. Some of it is obviously false on its face as an alert reader might recognize. The moose, for instance, was not “in season” because there is no season in the area where Baston was hunting.
But there are a couple of big questions any reporter should have asked him after consulting that “hard to read” state map. The first is this:
“If, as you claim, you’ve hunted this area before, how could you possibly confuse the South Fork Campbell Creek drainage with its old road and obvious overhead powerlines from the wild, roadless Ship Creek drainage to the east where that map indicates moose hunting is open?”
The second question is, however, the truly important one:
“Were you one of the 10 lucky hunters who won a drawing permit for the Sept. 1 to 15 moose hunt in that area open to hunting a mile away?”
Alaska State Troopers said today that Baston was not a winner in the permit drawing. Thus there was no mile-away open hunting area in which he could have legally shot the moose, as if the rest of his story wasn’t bull enough to begin with.
We’ll get into that later. First, we need to put a few other issues on the table.
So easily misled
Misleading journalists these days is apparently so easy that you don’t even have to be a slick politician to do it, and Baston did it nicely here.
Some, maybe many, reading the local newspaper might actually have believed he was some Alaska newbie who misread state hunting regulations and thought he could legally kill a bull moose in Powerline Pass, where the animals are hugely popular with wildlife photographers and wildlife viewers.
This has happened. Years ago, a pair of clueless, Lower-48 hunters new to Alaska shot a moose in plain sight of shocked tourists standing at the Anchorage Overlook in Chugach State Park.
But Baston was obviously not clueless about the Powerline Pass area, given his reference to having previously entered the area “from the Indian side,” this being the side near the Seward Highway community of Indian and not a reference to any particular Indian or Indians who use the local trails.
Baston knew this because he spent some or all of his childhood in Anchorage. One of his several Facebook pages says he attended Anchorage South High. And the records of the 2010 Arctic Winter Games, where at he represented Alaska in the snowboard competition, list his hometown as Anchorage.
When exactly he left Anchorage for university in Montana is unclear, but when he and a companion got busted in 2023 for poaching antlers, Montana Outdoors described Baston as an Anchorage resident.
Baston also knew enough about hunting in the Anchorage area to sell an ADN reporter the idea that he was “about a mile” from a legal hunting area, if one had the proper permit, in the Ship Creek valley.
This is a claim that would have been true if he was a crow. But he’s a human, which rather radically alters the actual distance to be covered between where he shot the moose and where he legally could have shot a moose if, again, he had the proper permit.
The straight line distance from Powerline Pass to the edge of the Ship Creek hunting unit is only about a mile. But to get there on foot, a hunter would have to bushwhack up and over the shoulder of a peak called The Ramp to get to Ship Creek Pass, and that would be a tough hike.
Because of this, most people heading for the pass use the Hidden Lake/Ship Creek Pass trail that climbs to 4,000 feet from where one can look down at Ship Lake and peer into the Ship Creek drainage heading north toward Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson (JBER).
This trail leaves the hugely popular Powerline Trail about two and a half miles from the Glen Alps parking lot in the Chugach Park. There is a short drop down to a bridge across South Fork Campbell Creek, near where Baston shot the moose, and then a steady climb for about two and a half miles to Hidden Lake.
There is a good trail to Hidden Lake, but most people going to Ship Lake Pass abandon the main trail about a mile from Powerline and follow one of various routes pioneered by other hikers or wildlife for a couple of miles or so up the valley to the pass between the Ramp and the Wedge.
The shortest of any of the various trails up the valley to the pass, a variety of which can be seen on a Hiking Project map, make for a hike of three to three and a half miles. Baston obviously knew enough about the Powerline area to suggest a hunter could enter the Ship Creek hunting area in this way.
The reporter, unfortunately, didn’t know enough to call him on his nonsense. The drop from the pass to the lake, you see, is long and steep. I once skied it with a very, very good cross-country skier who, being new to Alaska and having grown up in the Midwest, had little experience on long, steep slopes. He had a little bit of a freakout and had to be escorted down in a series of long, cross-slope traverses.
All of this is simply meant to explain that no one in their right mind would want to pack load after load of moose meat back up that slope, down the other side to the Powerline Pass Trail and then on to Glen Alps.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game says your average, legal-size bull moose will produce about 500 pounds of meat, although I once helped pack a big one of the Alaska Peninsula that weighed out, in wholly boned meat, at just shy of 800 pounds.
Still, let’s figure that the 28-year-old Baston shoots a moose that yeilds 500 pounds of meat. This is going to require a lot of meat packing. There was a time when I could probably haul a 100-pound load up the steep climb from Ship Lake to the Pass, and I’ve known others who could.
I’ve not, however, met many who’d be up to five trips up that slope with such a load. Most would probably cut the loads to a more manageable 75 pounds or less, but then you just add to the number of trips up and down the slope to get all the meat to the pass.
And at that point, you’re still five and a half trail miles – which would be a lot easier than the non-trail miles climbing up from Ship Lake – to reach Glen Alps. This would require a whole other set of trips.
Anyone with any experience moose hunting in Alaska, or big game hunting in general, would have immediately recognized Baston was blowing smoke with his claim to have planned to hunt Ship Pass via Powerline, even before finding out he lacked a permit to hunt Ship Creek, a fact that makes total garbage of his claim that he didn’t set out to illegally shoot a moose.
When you have no legal authority to shoot a moose, there is no way to shoot a moose other than illegally.
The questions
The saddest thing here is that with Baston apparently willing to talk, a reporter could have had a lot of fun interviewing him. My first question would have been this:
“So, which Indian-side trail did you normally use?”
There are two choices – the Indian Pass Trail and the Powerline Pass Trail – and neither are a particularly good way to get into the Ship Creek valley to hunt moose unless you have horses to haul out the meat.
The state park doesn’t even list the Indian Pass Trail among its hiking trails, but instead lumps it in with “horseback trails,” and therein describes it as a “moderate to advanced” trail climbing for six miles to the pass. A link to an older trail guide mentions that the “trail is part of the ‘Arctic to Indian,’ winter ski traverse” – winter being the time the trail is most often used because of all the creek crossings – and adds that “the descent to Indian is steep and often icy.”
It’s not icy this time of year. It’s brushy, muddy and a fairly arduous hike even without a 100-pound pack on your back. But if you’re going to enter the Ship Creek drainage to hunt moose, it’s better than the alternative.
The Powerline Pass trail is an old road that is largely dry and offers much better footing than the Indian Pass Trail. But there is a nasty, nasty climb on the way to the pass. Singletracks, a website for mountain bikers, describes the section from just below the pass itself to Indian this way:
It is steep enough and covered in enough loose stones and gravel that even some fairly competent mountain bikers have been known to get off their bikes and walk some sections of the descent. For the average hiker going uphill in the opposite direction, it’s a tough hike just to get from Indian to Glen Alps via Powerline Pass
But if you were hunting moose where Baston claimed to have been planning to hunt moose, this would be just the beginning of a moose-hunting ordeal, starting with the climb to Powerline Pass, a drop down to the Hidden Lake/Ship Pass Trail, followed by the climb up to Ship Pass and another long drop down into the Ship Creek drainage to hunt.
Nobody in their right mind is going to hunt the Ship Creek drainage in this way.
Which brings this back to the earlier question of how – if as Baston claimed – he’d previously hunted the area from the “Indian side,” and the original question of how he could be confused about hunting in the South Fork Campbell Creek drainage rather than the Indian Creek-Ship Creek drainage.
This is not easy mistake to make even if you were someone who knew very, very little about the area. The state map isn’t great, but it doesn’t take much map-reading skill to figure out the drainage in which it is legal to hunt versus the one in which it is illegal to hunt.
And if you can’t figure that out from the map, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website makes it very, very clear that the hunt is in the “Ship Creek Drainage above JBER.”
Anyone smart enough to figure out how to put ammunition in a rifle could tell the legal hunting area from the illegal hunting area. And Baston obviously knew where the legal hunting area was or he wouldn’t have made the claim that he was only a mile from the boundary of a legal hunting area.
He obviously gambled on selling this line to a reporter. He could have been asked whether he had a permit to hunt the area he said was open. But his bet that he knew more than the reporter turned out to be a good one.
There are likely to be far more non-moose hunters than moose hunters reading the ADN and Baston’s con likely worked nicely on them, although every moose hunter I know who read the ADN story recognized Baston’s claims as nonsense, simply given the terrain and the distances.
I was pretty damn fit in my younger years, and I still usually hunted moose with a partner or more than one because packing out the meat of a full-grown moose is a ton of work. And I can honestly say that if I’d had a partner who shot a moose on the wrong side of a steep ridge seven, or even five, miles from a river, which makes it possible to float the meat out on a boat; or an air strip, which makes it possible to fly the meat out; or a trailhead ending at a parking lot, I’d probably have thought seriously about shooting him.
I, personally, once shoot a big caribou, which is about a third the size of a moose, four or five miles up a mountain while with a companion who I think wanted to shoot me for setting up the chore that awaited us, and we had a pretty straight shot downhill to the Denali Highway, not a trip up and over a couple 4,000-foot passes.
The only logical conclusion that can be drawn about what Baston did in Powerline Pass is that he shot a moose illegally because he thought he could get away with it, and when he got caught he came up with some nonsense about being confused as to where he was, and got a stenographer to record that claim and put it in the newspaper where who knows how many people who lack the knowledge to know better could feel sorry for him as just some poor dude who didn’t know what he was doing.
Right.
One can only hope that Alaska Wildlife Troopers made Baston pack every last ounce of meat from that moose back to the Glen Alps trailhead and didn’t bring in a four-wheeler to haul it out before it began to spoil.
At a round-trip distance of five miles, Baston should have been able to haul 500 pounds of meat back to the parking lot over the course of a couple of days, and that would be a fitting, “hard labor” sentence levied before a judge hits him with a fine.
As for the ADN, which tried to cast Baston’s behavior in the best possible light given what he did, I can do no more than quote an observation from the late David John Moore Cornwell, and operative in Britain’s spy services, who later became a well-known author writing under the pseudonym of John le Carré.
“A desk,” le Carré once wrote, “is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
The world is now full of reporters who need to get out from behind those desks.
Categories: Commentary, Media, Outdoors
