The Story Behind Caribou Gear

This came from years of hunting, packing meat, and figuring out what fails when the work actually starts.

I grew up outside long before I thought about hunting the way people talk about it now.

As a kid in Denver, I was chasing anything that moved—rabbits, frogs, birds—dragging things home that probably didn’t belong there.

Over time that turned into fishing, then mountain trips, then eventually picking up a bow.

By the time I was 18, life looked different.

I was married. We had a child on the way. Money was tight.

Hunting and fishing weren’t hobbies anymore—they mattered.

When we moved to Buena Vista, Colorado, that’s where it really took hold.

That’s when I started understanding something most people don’t think about:

Getting an animal down is only part of the job.

Getting it out—and taking care of the meat—is where things get real.

If you hunt alone, you don’t drag animals out.

You break them down and pack them out.

That’s where game bags became necessary.

But even then, something was off.

They worked—but they broke down when the packout got long, the weather turned, or you were on your own.

The moment that shaped everything happened on a moose hunt in Alaska.

We got a bull down and spent the rest of the day—and into the next—packing meat to a raft.

After floating miles downstream, we staged the meat on deadfall away from camp.

Late that night, I woke up to wolves.

Not distant howls.

Close.

Close enough that you start thinking about whether that meat is still there—or if it’s already gone.

I couldn’t see the bags in the dark.

I didn’t know if they had moved the meat or not.

And standing there in the dark, I realized something simple:

I had no way to track or identify anything once it was out of my hands.

Back in Fairbanks, walking into a cooler full of game bags made it worse.

Rows of identical bags.

No clear way to tell what was mine.

No way to confirm what I was picking up was even my meat.

That’s when it became obvious:

Game bags weren’t built as a system.

They were just bags.

From 2001 to 2007, I tested everything I could get my hands on.

Canvas. Tarps. Different fabrics. Different builds.

Nothing worked the way it needed to.

The goal became clear:

breathe like cotton

perform like nylon

protect meat without trapping heat

That combination didn’t exist.

So I started building it.

After years of testing and working with manufacturers, we finally got a prototype.

I opened that package sitting at my son’s baseball game.

Pulled out the first bag.

And immediately knew:

This was the first version that actually worked the way it needed to.

Caribou Gear wasn’t built to sell game bags.

It was built to fix the failures that show up after the shot.

heat management

meat protection

identification

real packout conditions

Everything comes back to one thing:

Taking care of the meat when conditions are working against you.

When we say “Alaska tested,” it’s not a tagline.

It’s the standard.

That’s where gear gets pushed the hardest.

That’s where problems show up fast.

And that’s still the benchmark we build everything against.