BigGameHoundsmen.com

My Question is, Is bear hunting in Nothern Califonia any good ? I downloaded the fish & game regulations and have about decided that I might need a lawyer to explain the where you can hunt,when you can hunt,or no treeing switches ? Can anyone please help me with these concerns?

What part are you looking to hunt? Lots of people call northern cal. anything north of LA. Now if you live in northern cal. then its north of Sac. So fisrt off where are you talking? You can not have a tree switch of any kind for all of cal. Fish and game just changed the law to cover all treeing switches even the mag type and just so you know they rewrote the dog control zone so you might want to get an updated copy of the law 265 Use of Dogs for Pursuit/Take of Mammals or for Dog Training. As for when once deer hunting opens for the zone you are hunting in you can bear hunt in A,B, C, and I think D zone. I dont know about the X zones I never hunt them. Now when deer hunting is open in your zone you can only have one dog per hunter per tag. SO as long as you have 3 tags and 3 hunters you can run 3 dogs. Once the deer hunting is closed you can then run all the dogs you like. As for how hunting is some spots are really outstanding and others are not. I know not much help there but I cant really say with out know where your hunting and how your dogs hunt.

Bear hunting Northern Cal. is pretty good, follow the feed ,BUT..... NO TREE SWITCH, NO GSP, NO MORE THEN ONE DOG PER TAG UNTIL DEER SEASON IS CLOSE ( 31ST OF OCT +/-) NO BAITING , AND BEAR SEASON ENDS WHEN THEY ESTAMATE THAT WE HAVE TAKEN 1700 BEARS INCLUDING DEPERDATION BEARS AND ROAD KILLS , also rumor has it that there is a large # of out of state hunters taking a bear with a legal tag, taking it back to there state and parting them out for up to 10 times what they paid for the tag and lisence, and now Fish and Game is looking into doing away with the quoatas , other then that has pretty good bear hunting!!!

One more thing, do you know when the season starts and ends ? Is there a spring hunt and a fall hunt ?

The season starts when Deer season opens and that changes with what zone your in, there is no spring season or training season and there are dog closed zones up and down the state until Deer season opens.
And right now we don't know when it closes usually it's when F&G figures that we have taken 1700 for the state but they are talking about not closing it until the last Sunday in Dec.

whats up with X zones? Can you hunt them just like any other zone?

Not a lot of bears up in the North eastern x zones. Only a few and they are mostly on private ranches. Not a lot of Blm land around worth hunting. The north eastern x zones are juniper and sage, the bears are down south and in the western x zones where there is pines. X1-X2-X6-X7 are good for bear.

You can hunt some of the X zones, some of the X Zones are not in the legal bear hunting areas of the state. They do not start on the same day as the deer season, they start a week later and in most of them anymore the guides have been hammering the shit out of the bears (meaning they can be hard to find and most of the time there are strangers dogs at your tree).