Ha! I suspect if I had stopped for too long to think about what I was doing I might have realized how tough (dumb) it was going to be...
In the moment I was trying to avoid leaving stuff spread around the entire mountain range that I would have to retrieve later, I think? I'm not entirely sure...
Stats are great, but the devil gets buried in the details- look at climbing, statistically, I'm more likely to die driving to the mountain than climbing it, but stats hide things like time of exposure and exactly what kind of climbing I'm doing, every serious alpinist who has been in the game...
I use the Hydrapac inline filter, pretty quick for a squeeze type, just make sure you shake it out after you use it and maybe tuck it in your jacket until you're sure it's dry.
anything with hoses, even the insulated ones is going to be a pain if it gets cold enough, wide mouth nalgene, or...
I had to laugh at myself a little as the season went on, sheep did get quite a bit easier to find in the last week or so of the season, the last weekend I saw more sheep than I had in 27 days of scouting and hunting leading up to shooting my ram. I would have had considerably less anxiety about...
I didn't get a whole weight as we split it 3 ways midway back, it was at least 140, as that's what I got dry weight with no water, bino harness, or lower jaw on the sheep the next day, probably 155-160? it sucked, like real bad...
Somehow this suffering all worked to get me incredibly addicted to chasing sheep, and I spent all the time I could going back into the unit and glassing for Chris, as well as running into Mark shortly after he killed his ram, helping pack the last load to his camp, and spending an evening...
What followed was hours of the purest misery I have experienced with a pack, I pulled as much as possible together and weighed it later, I am 100% sure it was upwards of 140 lbs. and probably closer to 155, not fun bushwhacking for the first 3 miles before I caught a trail, and not all that fun...
After a quick photo session, we got to cutting. In the dark, no less—not something I would have included on my bingo card for “things that might happen while sheep hunting.” In fact, not much of what happened that day was on that list of preconceived ideas. We loaded up, with me carrying the...
With a speed I think is unique to sheep, the entire bunch launched downhill and were out of sight in the blink of an eye, the ram I had shot at appearing none the worse for wear.
The next couple of minutes were a roller coaster of emotions. Had I really just whiffed on the biggest shot of my...
At this point, we had a bit of the "Do you want to shoot? Are you sure?" discussion, as there were two mature rams in sight, and I was in favor of trying to double up. Chris declined, as he wasn't ready to be done yet. For me, even though it was only the second day, this ram had everything I was...
We climbed straight up all the way to the ridge at almost 13,000' to get the wind in our favor, then traversed over to see if we could locate the sheep. This turned out to be more of a challenge than we anticipated. The little basin where the sheep were had more trees than I had initially seen...
I followed the trail for a couple of miles before cutting off and bushwhacking as straight as I could toward the drainage that would offer an approach, quickly realized that I had been in about the only spot with a view of the sheep as I was unable to get eyes on them again from any of the spots...
I immediately started packing my gear and running through the possible approaches. The smart thing would have been to go back and grab my camp, moving my base closer to the sheep, but after doing the math, I realized there was no way I could cover that extra mileage and still make it to the...
On day two, I decided to return to my original glassing knob to switch things up a bit. I figured there hadn’t been any sheep there for the past day and a half, since I could see Kurt, the deer hunter, on top of the knob and I assumed he would signal me if he spotted any rams. For the next...
Opening Day:
I returned to the glassing point above camp, a brisk warm-up of 1,100 feet of elevation in just 0.6 miles. I quickly spotted eight ewes where the big group had been the past few days, even capturing a nice silhouette of one of them against the sunrise through my spotting scope...
On Monday, the boys decided to sleep in, so my friend and I headed to our original glassing knob. We arrived just after daylight and found Kurt, a bowhunter from Wisconsin who had packed in the day before and was glassing for deer. Soon, we spotted the same small band of rams from the two days...