And "YET" few have ever seen this. I seriously doubt that hunters today have ever watched tens of thousands come through day after day, for months, valleys full of caribou, "flowing" like an endless a river of caribou as far in both directions as you can see. Herds were numbered in the "HUNDREDS" of thousands. The State ran snowplows in the summer to push the dead caribou off the highway. Semi-tractor trailers would have up to five or more dead caribou, or even live caribou wedged allover the rig.
Non-residents could harvest three caribou. Residents five.
Early 70's flew five non-resident caribou hunters out to Swiss Lake (two men and their young sons). The deal was we would only fly them and a total of ten caribou out, don't shoot more then ten. There were five or seven hundred caribou there at that cabin on Swiss Lake, when we dropped them off, the hunters were quivering with excitement. Later that day, we had to fly fuel out to a mining camp twenty miles past Swiss Lake.
They had thirty five caribou dead or flopping when we flew over them, and they were still shooting. We could not land with a several drums of fuel on board, well we could have landed, but could not have been able to take off, so we went onto the mining camp. When we came back we did not bother the count caribou on the ground. We said, what the hell are you doing...??? One of the men answered, were are out of ammo, and there are still some need finishing. We got a "survival axe" out of the plane, told them to finish killing the ones still alive, we would be back in the morning to start hauling them out.
Like I said, we did not count dead caribou when we returned, but my guess is fifty maybe sixty.