Born in Alaska in 1993 · 30,000+ sold · Ships across the U.S. and to Canada
Born in Alaska in 1993 · 30,000+ sold · Ships across the U.S. and to Canada
ALASKA MASTER GUIDE #147
Forty plus years of guiding moose hunts in Alaska. Thirty plus years of building the call hunters take with them.
#147
300+
1976
~7,000 hrs
30,000+
I hold Alaska Master Guide License #147. I got my Assistant guide license in 1981. I’ve been a registered Alaska big game guide since 1986 and a Master Guide since 2004. Since 1986 I’ve guided-outfitted well over 300 hunts: moose, brown and grizzly bear, black bear, Dall sheep.
I came to Alaska in 1976 and never found a reason to leave. Marilyn and I live in a shop/hangar on Jacobsen Lake outside Wasilla. I own my own Super Cub and have about 7,000 hours of Alaska bush flying behind me, most of it low and slow over country nobody drives to.
I run a small operation on purpose. We seldom take more than two hunts at once, and I actively participate in every hunt myself. Low volume is what lets me match a hunt to what a particular hunter can actually do.
Most of what I know about calling moose I learned working, in front of paying clients, where being wrong could cost somebody a once-in-a-lifetime trophy. The Bull Magnet® came out of that, and so did every word of method on this site.
THE RECORD
1976
1981
My first guide license.
1986
My registered Alaska big game guide license, and the year I started Alaska Remote Guide Service.
1987
Started running my own hunts under Alaska Remote Guide Service.
1992
1993
2004
2007
June 2025
Alaska Professional Hunters Association: twelve years on the board, ten of them as vice president.
Matanuska-Susitna Fish and Game Advisory Committee: nine years, six of them as chairman.
Featured in Hunt Alaska magazine: Calling Moose with the Bull Magnet, written by Marcus Weiner, who has hunted with one since 2011.
And in Dropped In Alaska, the hunting series made by Chris and Casey Keefer.
Most of my hunts run inside a “sole use” guide concession in Denali Preserve, in the heart of the Alaska Range near Mt. Denali. Six hundred-plus square miles. Sole use means exactly what it says: I am the only guide who can legally conduct hunts in there. My current concession contract runs through 2027.
In 2007 it was expanded to take in country that had been off limits to guiding for nineteen years. Since guide areas disappeared in 1988, most state land in Alaska takes heavy guiding pressure. Mine doesn’t, and that’s the point: remote country, minimal competition, and moose that haven’t been called at by six other outfits before you got there.
I’ll add one number that I think says more than the acreage does. Alaskan terrain, weather and game are all genuinely hard, and in forty-five years no client of mine has ever been hurt worse than scratches, blisters or sore muscles.
THE FIRST ONES
I didn’t set out to build a product. A megaphone does something no other piece of moose gear does: it carries your cow calls and bull grunts a long way out, and it puts the nasal quality into them that a bull is listening for. Put the small end to your ear and it works the other direction too, and you’ll hear a bull answer from two or three times further out than you would otherwise.
By 1993 enough people had asked about it that Marilyn and I developed the idea properly, trademarked the name, and started hand-crafting and selling them. Ours was the first 2-stage angled design.
From 1993 through 2024, every Bull Magnet® was built by hand in Alaska out of fiberglass, mostly by Marilyn and me. They ran 13 to 18 inches and were mostly antler-colored light brown, though we made some in white and camouflage, and a few in red and blue for friends who wanted to cheer on a team with one. Since then more than 30,000 have gone out to hunters across the United States, Canada and beyond.
As for the name: it came out of a scene in Pretty Woman, where Julia Roberts explains that her mother called her a “bum magnet.” It stuck. It has been Bull Magnet® ever since, and I’ve never come up with anything better.
THE ONE CHANGE IN 32 YEARS
Fiberglass is tough, and I sold it for thirty-two years. It also cracks or splits under extreme use, it gives off a chemical odor, it can leave you itching or picking out slivers, an accidental bump rings tinny, and how good the thrashing sounds depends far too much on how you happen to be holding it.
So we went looking. We researched resin and polymer blends and narrowed it to five finalists, then produced six samples of each. Nine of the most experienced moose hunters and guides in Alaska (friends, all of them, and none of them shy) put the samples through repeated striking and abuse in temperatures down to minus 5°F, left them out in rain and sunlight, and judged sound quality across the whole temperature range.
The winner was unanimous. It’s lighter, it’s stronger, the tone is slightly deeper, the nasal quality is better on both cow calls and bull grunts, and one unit sounds like the next, which fiberglass never quite managed. The shape didn’t change at all. The new cream color shows up better when you’re flashing.
That’s the entire reason for the change, and I’d rather say it plainly than dress it up: I found a better material and I switched.
5
6
9
−5°F
Unanimous
ACROSS A CAMP TABLE
The Bull Magnet® is a megaphone. You supply the voice; it supplies the volume and the tone. Anyone can make a passable cow call (it’s an “e” “r” sound) and even young kids make a good one with a little practice. Calling moose isn’t a talent. It’s a method, and I’ve published all of mine, free, on these two sites.
What I won’t tell you is that it’s quick. Most response to my calling, even at the peak of the rut, takes four to twelve hours, and sometimes a day or two. Moose are most active at night, and a bull who hears you at first light may well finish his nap before he comes to look. A bull that already has cows around him often won’t come at all. You go to him. The hunters who fill freezers are the ones who sit one good spot for three days instead of walking twenty miles and pushing every bull in the country out ahead of them.
Calling brings in more than bulls. Brown, grizzly and black bears answer calls too. I’ve had it happen, and so have plenty of my customers. A bull at the peak of rut is a dangerous animal and covers ground fast. And wear bright red or hunter orange, especially when you’re flashing: you are deliberately making yourself look and sound like a moose to anything else within earshot. Stay alert and don’t let your guard down!!
ALL OF IT, FREE
The Bull Magnet® is $68, made in the USA, and ships across the U.S. and to Canada. If you’d rather just read the method first, that’s genuinely fine. It’s all up there and it always has been.
Good luck and happy hunting!
