The Fortymile Caribou Federal Subsistence Hunt: Everything You Need to Know About the 2025 Season
Every August, a stretch of subarctic Alaska comes alive with movement — thousands of caribou pushing across the tundra and spruce flats of the eastern interior, threading through river drainages and crossing highways with the indifference only a truly wild animal can manage. For the rural communities scattered across this landscape, that migration is not a spectacle. It is a lifeline. And for 2025, the federal government has once again authorized their chance to harvest it.
The Bureau of Land Management's Eastern Interior Field Office has opened the Fortymile caribou federal subsistence hunt in Units 20E, 25C, and a portion of 20F, running from early August through the end of September. It is an annual ritual with deep roots — one that sits at the intersection of federal land management, Indigenous food sovereignty, population biology, and the rugged practicalities of Alaskan rural life. But in 2025, that ritual is unfolding against a backdrop of growing concern over the long-term health of the Fortymile herd.
The 2025 Hunt: Dates, Limits, and Who Can Participate
The federal subsistence hunt opened at 12:01 a.m. on August 5, 2025, carrying a harvest limit of two bull caribou, and was originally scheduled to close at 11:59 p.m. on September 30, 2025. Those dates, however, proved optimistic. The herd showed up near the highways in force — and the season was over almost before it started.
The BLM Eastern Interior Field Office announced an emergency special action to close the fall Fortymile Caribou Federal Subsistence Hunt on federal lands in Units 20E, 25C, and a portion of 20F beginning at noon on Friday, August 29, 2025. That is less than four weeks after the opener — a stark reminder of just how quickly harvest quotas can be reached when caribou congregate near accessible roads.
Caribou were abundant near the Steese Highway, resulting in a higher harvest than previous years, and to prevent overharvest, BLM made the decision to close the fall federal Fortymile Hunt under authority delegated by the Federal Subsistence Board, after consultation with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The speed of the closure is a testament to how carefully managers are watching harvest numbers this year — and how little margin for error the herd's current population affords them.
Who Qualifies — and How the Permit System Works
The federal subsistence caribou hunt is limited to federally qualified rural residents hunting on federal public lands only, including federal public lands accessible from the Steese and Taylor highways. That single sentence carries enormous weight. It means that not just any Alaskan — and certainly not hunters from the Lower 48 — can simply show up and participate. The eligibility rules are precise and enforced.
To qualify to hunt under federal subsistence regulations, a hunter must have their primary, permanent place of residence in one of the designated rural communities or game management units, and must have lived in Alaska for the previous 12 months. For hunting in Units 20E and 25C, that means residents of Units 20D, 20E, 20F, 25, 12 (north of Wrangell-St. Elias National Preserve), Eureka, Livengood, Manley, and Minto. These are not abstract geographic designations — they are the actual towns, villages, and roadless communities where families depend on wild meat to stock their freezers through the long, dark Alaskan winter.
Hunting for caribou in Unit 25C is managed through joint state and federal registration permits — RC860 in the fall and RC867 in the winter — and an unlimited number of permits are available through the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. That open permit structure reflects the philosophy behind federal subsistence law: access should not be artificially constrained for qualified rural residents. The herd's population, not a permit cap, is what limits opportunity.
All registered hunters may harvest caribou under state regulations, but only federally qualified rural residents may harvest caribou under federal subsistence regulations. The distinction matters because federal subsistence regulations can allow different harvest limits, different seasons, and different priority access than the parallel state system — particularly when herd numbers force tradeoffs between subsistence users and the broader hunting public.
A Herd in Decline: The Population Context Behind the Quotas
To understand why this hunt is managed so carefully — and why that emergency August closure landed with such urgency — you have to understand what has happened to the Fortymile herd over the past few years. The numbers are sobering.
Using the results from last summer's photocensus, along with composition, reproductive, and survival data collected over the past year, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game developed a modeled estimate of the current herd size. Models indicate the herd has continued to decline since last summer, with an estimated mid-summer population of 24,000 to 28,000 animals. To put that in perspective, the herd was nearly twice that size just a few years ago.
A previous estimate from 2022 put the herd at about 40,000 animals. That is a loss of somewhere between 12,000 and 16,000 caribou in roughly three years — a decline that has forced wildlife managers to rethink virtually every aspect of how the hunt is structured, from season timing to zone allocations to the absolute prohibition on harvesting cows.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced reduced quotas and revised season dates for the 2025–2026 Fortymile caribou hunts, following continued population declines in the herd. These are not precautionary adjustments made out of an abundance of caution — they are reactive measures responding to real, documented population losses that have been trending in the wrong direction for years.
The Numbers Behind the 2025 Quotas
The annual quota for the 2025–2026 hunting seasons is 525 animals, with the bag limit restricted to bulls only — no cow harvest — and a pre-season allocation of 395 bulls for the fall hunt across all zones and 130 bulls for the winter hunt. Compare those figures to the previous season: the annual quota for 2024–2025 was set at 565 bulls only, with a pre-season allocation of 425 bulls for the fall hunt and 140 bulls for the winter hunt. The trend is a steady ratcheting down of allowable harvest as the herd contracts.
These reduced quotas may result in delayed season openings and shorter seasons than in previous years, and if quotas are met early, season closures could be announced by emergency order on short notice. That is exactly what happened in 2025, and it was not entirely unexpected. When caribou stack up near the Steese Highway, experienced hunters know the season can close before most people have even gotten their gear sorted.
The complete prohibition on cow harvest is particularly significant from a population recovery standpoint. In a herd that is declining, every reproductive female represents future calves — the biological foundation of any recovery. Protecting cows is the most direct tool managers have to arrest a downward population trend, and its inclusion as a hard rule for 2025–2026 signals how seriously biologists are taking the current situation.
A Herd With a Long and Volatile History
The Fortymile caribou herd has seen dramatic swings in population before, and the current decline — alarming as it is — must be understood in that historical context. The Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, the First Nations people of the Dawson City region in Yukon, voluntarily stopped hunting the caribou herd after its numbers dropped to a low of 6,500 animals. That was a different era, a different collapse, and a remarkable act of restraint by a community that had hunted those animals for generations.
The herd recovered from that nadir to a peak of roughly 560,000 animals in the 1990s — one of the great wildlife recovery stories in North American history. It has since gone through several cycles of growth and contraction, but the current trajectory is drawing serious attention from biologists on both sides of the Alaska-Yukon border, since the Fortymile herd is a transboundary population that does not recognize international lines.
From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, Fortymile caribou hunting regulations in Alaska were designed to benefit local hunters and to prevent harvest from limiting herd growth by utilizing bag limits, harvest quotas, and season openings. Hunting seasons were deliberately scheduled to avoid periods when road crossings were likely, shifting harvest toward trail systems, rivers, and small airstrips. That kind of strategic scheduling — keeping hunters away from the herd when it is most concentrated and most vulnerable — is the same principle driving today's delayed openings and emergency closures.
How the Federal Subsistence System Actually Works
For hunters outside Alaska, the federal subsistence framework can seem like a labyrinthine tangle of agencies, regulations, and overlapping jurisdictions. In reality, it is a carefully constructed system designed to fulfill a specific legal mandate: protecting the subsistence way of life for rural Alaskans on federal public lands.
Title VIII of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, known as ANILCA, provides an opportunity for federally qualified subsistence users to meet the needs of living in rural Alaska where there are limited alternatives to replace food supplies. That statutory foundation is what gives the BLM the authority to open and close the Fortymile federal subsistence hunt independent of — though in coordination with — the state regulatory process. When federal lands are involved, federal subsistence rules can differ meaningfully from state rules, and those differences are not incidental. They are the whole point.
BLM made the decision to authorize the Fortymile Hunt under authority delegated by the Federal Subsistence Board, after consultation with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Eastern Interior Subsistence Regional Advisory Council. That consultation process is not ceremonial. It is how legitimate conflicts between conservation goals, federal trust responsibilities, state management authority, and rural community needs get worked out before seasons are announced.
The BLM Alaska Eastern Interior Field Office manager holds the authority to set seasons and harvest limits for federal subsistence hunting for caribou on federal lands in Game Management Units 25C, 20E, and a part of 20F. These will be announced in a BLM Alaska press release and posted on the Federal Subsistence Management website and the BLM Alaska Facebook page. In practice, that announcement process gives rural hunters a short window to prepare — which is why monitoring the Fortymile Hotline is not optional for anyone planning to participate.
Navigating the Landscape: Maps, Highways, and Access Points
Maps to aid in locating federal public lands open to the federal subsistence hunt near the Elliott, Steese, and Taylor highways are available from the BLM Fairbanks Public Room and are included in the Federal Subsistence Hunting Map Series in BLM Alaska's georeferenced PDF map collection. The georeferenced PDFs are particularly useful in the field because they can display a hunter's current GPS position overlaid on the land ownership boundaries — the critical distinction between federal public lands, where the subsistence rules apply, and state or private lands, where they do not.
The Steese Highway corridor — the stretch of paved and gravel road running northeast from Fairbanks toward Circle — is consistently one of the most productive areas during the fall hunt, precisely because the caribou routinely cross or follow drainages adjacent to that route. That concentration of animals near an accessible road is what drove the explosive harvest rate that triggered the August 29 emergency closure this year. When the herd is moving through that corridor, experienced subsistence hunters can fill their limits in hours.
The Winter Hunt: A Different Game Entirely
For hunters who missed the fall season — whether because the closure caught them off guard or because the logistics of a remote Alaskan caribou hunt could not be assembled in time — the winter hunt offers another opportunity, though with its own distinct set of constraints.
The BLM Eastern Interior Field Office will open the Fortymile caribou federal subsistence winter hunt on federal public lands in Units 20E, 25C, and a portion of 20F on October 27, 2025. The hunt is limited to federally qualified rural residents hunting on federal public lands only, including lands accessible from the Steese and Taylor highways, and opens at 12:01 a.m. on October 27, 2025, with a harvest limit of one bull caribou — counting any harvests from other caribou hunts in Alaska since July 1, 2025.
The winter hunt closes at 11:59 p.m. on March 31, 2026, unless otherwise modified during the season — such as by emergency special action to prevent overharvest. The tighter one-bull limit for the winter hunt, compared to the two-bull fall limit, reflects both the smaller overall winter quota and the cumulative accounting across the full hunting year. A hunter who took a caribou in the fall under a different registration permit would have that animal count against their winter limit.
Winter motor vehicle limitations will be enforced when snowpack reaches six inches or after November 9, 2025. That provision is not trivial. Winter caribou hunting in Interior Alaska often means navigating on snowmachines across terrain that is genuinely unforgiving, and the motor vehicle rules shape where and how hunters can legally access caribou once the snow arrives. Knowing those rules before heading out is not just a legal obligation — it is basic safety planning.
What the Emergency Closure Reveals About Herd Dynamics in 2025
The emergency special action that slammed the fall season shut on August 29 tells a story that goes beyond simple harvest management. It reveals something important about where the Fortymile herd is moving, and why that movement is creating both opportunity and risk simultaneously.
Caribou were so abundant near the Steese Highway in Zones 1 and 4 that managers expected the harvest quota to be exceeded in less than a day if the season had opened as scheduled. That kind of road accessibility — caribou essentially walking within rifle range of a highway — dramatically compresses the time between season opener and quota fulfillment. It is a phenomenon that wildlife managers elsewhere in Alaska have had to contend with as caribou ranges shift in response to changing vegetation patterns, predator distributions, and climate-driven alterations to traditional migration corridors.
The paradox is real: a herd in decline can still appear locally abundant. Caribou that congregate near roads are highly visible and highly vulnerable, even if the broader population is contracting. This is precisely why the state delayed road-accessible zone openings to August 20, 2025, while allowing the remote Zone 2 to open earlier on August 10 — the fall season in road-accessible Zones 1, 3, and 4 was set to open on August 20, 2025, while the opening date for Zone 2 (the remote area) was August 10, 2025. The logic is straightforward: remote hunters who must invest real effort to reach caribou are less likely to fill quotas at the explosive rate that road hunters can achieve when animals are right at the pavement's edge.
For Qualified Hunters: Key Contacts and Resources
Anyone who believes they qualify for the Fortymile federal subsistence hunt and wants to plan for future seasons needs to start with the right information sources. The regulatory landscape changes year to year, and the consequences of hunting out of season or on the wrong land ownership are serious.
Information and updates on the RC860 caribou hunt are available on the Fortymile Hotline at (907) 267-2310, and for additional information about the subsistence hunt, hunters can contact the BLM Eastern Interior Field Office at (907) 474-2200 or EasternInterior@blm.gov. Calling the hotline before departing for the field is not just recommended — for anyone hunting near the Steese or Taylor highway corridors in a year like 2025, when emergency closures can come with less than a week's notice, it is essential.
Successful hunters must report their harvest within three days of the kill, either online at hunt.alaska.gov, by phone at (907) 883-2971, or in person at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game office in Tok. Timely harvest reporting is not bureaucratic busywork. It is the data pipeline that allows biologists to track how quickly zone quotas are being filled and to make real-time decisions about emergency closures — exactly the system that kept the 2025 fall hunt from going severely over quota.
The Bigger Picture: Subsistence, Conservation, and the Future of the Fortymile Herd
The 2025 Fortymile federal subsistence hunt sits at a genuinely precarious moment in the herd's long history. The decline from approximately 40,000 animals in 2022 to an estimated 24,000 to 28,000 in 2025 is not catastrophic by historical standards — the herd has been far lower and recovered — but it demands a management posture that prioritizes the herd's biological future over short-term harvest maximization.
To maintain hunting opportunities while minimizing the risk of further population decline, the annual harvest quota for the herd will remain at a reduced level, set at 525 total animals for the 2025–2026 seasons, with all harvest restricted to bulls only. Every management decision this season — the August 5 federal opener, the staggered state zone openings, the emergency August 29 closure, the single-bull winter limit — flows from that core conservation commitment.
For the rural communities of Interior Alaska's eastern corridor, subsistence caribou hunting is not recreational. It is economic, cultural, and nutritional in ways that are difficult to convey to audiences who have never spent a winter in Chicken, Circle, or Central. The meat in a subsistence hunter's freezer is not a trophy room trophy — it is protein that feeds families through months when fresh food is expensive, distant, and logistically complicated to obtain. The federal subsistence framework exists to protect that reality. And the emergency closure on August 29 demonstrates that, even when it is painful to implement, the system is working as designed.
Looking ahead, the trajectory of the Fortymile herd will determine how much hunting opportunity remains viable in coming seasons. Population estimates for the Fortymile caribou herd stretch back to 1920, providing a century of context for the current decline — and for the recoveries that have followed past low points. Wildlife managers on both sides of the Alaska-Yukon border are watching the population data closely. For now, the fall 2025 season closed early, the winter hunt is open with tight limits, and the herd keeps moving across the tundra, indifferent to the bureaucratic machinery that governs who may pursue it and when.
