There is not much smaller in North American big-game hunting than the muskox opportunity Alaska is putting on the board for October 1. The registration hunt, RX110, opens in Unit 26B east of the Dalton Highway Corridor Management Area on the North Slope with four bull-only permits, one per household, on a first-come, first-served basis. Two permits go out in Nuiqsut at 9:00 a.m. That day and two in Kaktovik at 4:00 p.m. Hunt notice carrying the ADF&G announcement.
The context underneath those four permits is a population that has been through a hard recent decade. The Unit 26B herd is estimated at 220 muskoxen and sits below the state’s management objective, but a harvestable surplus of bull muskoxen is what enables the limited registration hunt to happen at all. The season window is December 15, 2026 through March 31, 2027; hunters may not use aircraft to transport muskox, hunters, or gear; and any horns transported out of Unit 26 must be defaced by a cut through each horn within two inches of the eye. The distal portion of the horn has to be submitted to ADF&G in Fairbanks within three days of leaving the unit.
The story of how there is any Unit 26B muskox to hunt is a translocation story that began nearly a century after the state lost its original herds. Muskox were extirpated in Alaska by the 1920s, and today about 4,000 exist in Alaska in four general areas, according to ADF&G’s statewide muskox page. The North Slope population traces back to a pair of 1969-1970 releases: 51 muskox from Nunivak Island were released on Barter Island near Kaktovik, and 13 more at the Kavik River on the eastern North Slope. The Seward Peninsula herd, which today holds most of the state’s animals, started with a separate 1970 release of 36 muskox on the peninsula’s southern edge.
The Unit 26B trajectory in the years since the reintroduction ran up and then back down. The herd was estimated at about 300 in Unit 26B and eastern Unit 26A in 2005; the combined 26B and 26C population was later described as likely fewer than 250 animals. The current 220 estimate sits inside that same declining arc. That is why four permits — not forty — is the number Alaska is willing to release for this hunt cycle, and why every step of the trophy-destruction requirement is calibrated to keep the harvest visible and enforceable in a herd where losing even a handful of extra bulls has population-scale consequences.
