Bowsite.com

I booked with this outfitter, Mike Hawkridge, at the recommendation of the broker I was working with at Outdoors International. The broker knew that my buddy and I would be hunting with traditional bows. The outfitter knew this as well. I booked this hunt almost 18 months in advance so everyone had time to get things in order. After the contract was signed, the outfitter became almost impossible to get in contact with. My best bet was to send a Facebook message to his wife. When we got less than a month out, my guide started contacting me and I got my questions answered through him. When the hunt started, the first thing my buddy and I learned was that neither of our guides were bow hunters nor did they know anything about bow hunting. One of the guides had never even been in the area we were hunting in before we pulled up in front of the cabin that day! The guides did their best but I got really tired of hearing "If we were rifle hunting...". There were times when I felt that they held our choice of weapons against us. We never had a moose within bow range. That, in itself, is not unusual but you just wonder if things would have played out differently had we had guides who were bow hunters. The main thing that upset us about the hunt, though, was that the outfitter just blew us off. We never laid eyes on him, he never checked with us to see if things were okay, and he completely ignored the fact that we were hunting with stickbows. I sent him an email about all of this the day I got back to civilization and I will be very surprised if I ever hear from him again.

Was the outfitter notified of problems? - YES