Gary Butch King - Alaska Master Guide #97

   Born in the US Territory of Alaska before Statehood, Gary Butch King started his Alaska hunting career at young age of 12 years old, as camp boy at the Wrangell Mountain Lodge for legendary Alaska guide Lee Holen.   Holen would be Butch’s mentor for the next seventeen years as he came up through the ranks of Alaska big game guides.  Butch purchased Cinder River Lodge; when Holen retired in 1983.  Butch and his bride Kathy, then  purchase Wildman Lake Lodge, 80 miles southwest, in 1996. 

   Today, he is licensed to hunt approximately two million acres of Alaska finest trophy brown bear and moose habitat on the famed Alaska Peninsula from Wildman Lake Lodge, the  finest hunting and fishing lodge in all of Alaska.   

   First learning to fly at age 14, Gary "Butch" King obtained his private pilot license at age 17,  commercial pilot by age 18.  He has logged well over 12,000 hours flying the Alaska bush in all types of aircraft and all kinds of weather.  Butch holds rating to fly single or multi engine airplanes equipped with floats, wheels or skis, in visual or instrument flight conditions and is an FAA licensed  helicopter pilot and also holds an aircraft and engine mechanic.  He can pretty much build, maintain and fly anything with wings or rotors.  

   Butch has personally guided hundreds of clients to huge Alaska trophies including brown bear,  moose, caribou, grizzly, wolf and Dall sheep.  As a hunter, he has taken pretty much all of the Alaskan species and has hunted the Yukon  and Northwest Territories in Canada as well has most of the Western United States, Mexico and South America. Overseas safaris have taken he and Kathy to Botswana and South Africa as well as  Tasmania, Queensland and the Northern Territory of Australia.  

    Today, Butch and Kathy King spend spring, summer and fall at Wildman Lake Lodge on the remote Alaska Peninsula.  During Butch’s long Alaska guiding career, his clients have taken the #1 SCI Brown Bear on two occasions, several in the top ten and currently hold thirteen of the top 25 ranking Alaska Brown Bear in the book.    At the 2000 Safari Club International Convention, Butch received the “North American Professional Hunter of the Year Award” and received Dallas Safari Club’s “Outfitter of the Year Award” in 2000.  Butch says what he enjoys most is showing people Alaska, where he and Kathy were both born and grew up.