A sheep story:

[squirrel]

IMG_1418 by squirrel2012, on Flickr

As the impudent squirrel leaves his safe nest and goes right to the dog house in the front yard and slowly lifts his leg on it's corner...

The excitement of drawing another bighorn sheep tag was tempered somewhat by the fact that I had already booked a lot of llama rentals for that time frame. After a lot of phone calls explaining the situation to all of them (an understanding audience, as they were all hunters) I was confident I could pull off about five weeks on the sheep mountain, out of the six week season.
I was in good condition as I had hiked three-to four hundred miles looking for antlers followed by one hundred-one hundred twenty five miles of chasing turkeys, all I needed was to take it to “sheep shape”, which is never actually attained unless you can chase one down and wring his neck barehanded, sheep country has a way of “raising the bar” for fitness that is acceptable! I had a chance to take one last big hike looking for elk antlers before the green of spring covered them all from view, so went on a fourteen mile hike on Memorial day, the next morning my throbbing right foot told me the bad news, after a two-plus year hiatus my gout had come back to visit. No problem, I have a pill for that… but it did not bring relief. I was working on a stepladder every day and just kept re-aggravating it, getting some relief on weekends but never truly getting it under control. In July I went to the Dr. and got a new, more potent pill, stressing that I HAD to be able to walk by September. It worked to a large extent but remnant stiffness kept me from being able to take real walks of over a couple easy miles until early August when I could finally go five miles.

IMG_1430 by squirrel2012, on Flickr

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My plan was to take pack llamas in about ten miles and spike out from there into the sheep rocks where they could not go, but I had an elk hunting partner who would stay at the llama camp hunting archery elk and checking on my animals daily as he hunted. It was a good plan, not perfect by any means but a good solid plan. My sore hoof had kept me from a single scouting trip, which is of course, critical to confirming your plans’ validity; everybody’s got a plan… until they take a hit. A week before the opener I got time off to backpack in, yes I said backpack, as I had to leave my llamas at home as part of a plea bargain to get my wife to deliver them to a previous commitment, and while I have lots of llamas I only have one truck…
The country was rough, I knew it would be, even by sheep standards, that being largely responsible for its being an easy draw unit. My dog and I got to base camp in one day, then hiked up and over into sheep country the next, about four thousand feet of vertical, a crucial test of the gout foot, but, while sore, no swelling was triggered. While I was far from where I had hoped to be, conditioning wise, I was in sheep country, tag in hand, life was good!


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[squirrel]

IMG_1991 by squirrel2012, on Flickr

I left camp behind and went back home to pack all my other stuff, and get some llamas sent off on rentals with archers, leaving me with my four least capable to go with me. It was here that I made a very critical mistake by agreeing to car pool with my elk hunting buddy (it was a seven hour drive to the trailhead). After a very long travel/hiking day we arrived at base camp just before evening, very happy that camp was already set up. The next day was spent setting a nice base camp up and packing my spike camp a couple miles into the sheep rocks ready for the opener the following day.
For all of the opening day excitement, it was a bust, without a sheep being spotted, although some fresh tracks were found at a high water source. On day two I found seven ewes/lambs lying far below next to a lake, but no boys were seen. Day three was another blank as far as sheep spotting went. The good news was, while footsore, no gout made its way into my boots, and with three- five thousand feet of climbing daily I could feel my legs beginning to toughen up. On either day four or five I just got settled in to glass my chosen basin and saw a group of ten rams scampering down into tree line a half mile away ahead of the rising sun. So they are hiding in the trees eh? Now I had the dirty buggers! A repositioning was in order, circling to come in from the other point of the mountain. For this I had to return to base camp, and go about two miles further and set up spike camp to come back at them from a better angle. While in base camp I got the ominous news that my buddy “missed his kids”, this was not good.


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The next morning I was watching a basin from some stinky sheep beds (a good sign!) and saw three small rams working towards me, they drank then came straight to me to bed where I was standing, finally stopping in confusion at twenty-eight yards wondering what that funny stump was doing in their favorite bedroom. They were very playful and kept whacking heads with each other playing “king of the rock” while trying to decide whether it was ok to bed so close to that stinky stump. Eventually they ended up bedded about seventy-five yards down the hill from me. The next day I went out across the mountain to where I had seen the ten rams. It was far rougher and more terrifying than it had appeared from a distance, very steep, consisting mostly of tiny little ledges of thick trees and sheer cliffs of stone, sheep paradise but an archers’ nightmare, just traversing it was challenge enough, seeing, approaching, and shooting a sheep was pretty much out of the question. Waking up the next day sore as hell convinced me to just watch the basin with the stream trickling down it. As the sun started to hit the rocks a ewe and a small ram came into the basin from the far side and worked their way down to drink, ending up bedded down about one hundred fifty yards below me. While bouncing down the cliffy slope the ewe led the way with the young ram following her down, at one point he started a huge rock slide with a football size stone whizzing by mamas’ head by just inches, the look she shot at him was priceless, he, of course, being a man, didn’t care a whit.

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[Big Fin]

I have a feeling this one is going to be worth reading.

 

[Dave N]

Yup, I've been following and waiting. Love the pics!

 

[mtmander]

yes great pictures

 

[jhudson1]

I'll agree with the others great read and photos. Looking forward to more!

 

[Tradewind]

beautiful country

 

[Timberhawk]

Like

 

[mtmiller]

Looking forward to more.

 

[BeartoothFront]

Eagerly waiting the rest of this story. looks like awesome sheep country.

 

[AZBridger]

also tuned in...looks like a great story in the making

 

[squirrel]

IMG_1902 by squirrel2012, on Flickr

I think it was on this day that I got to see something very strange, a “herd” of ermines canvassing a huge field of rocks in concert at almost 13,000 feet. I would assume they were after the pikas, which were everywhere making hay for the winter, possibly the vicious little guys were after marmots, they are a pound of 100% badass after all, I never knew they went nearly that high before witnessing that.
I watched the bedded sheep for an hour or so then got the dreaded text, I NEED TO GO HOME RIGHT NOW, I DO NOT WANT TO DIE ON THIS MOUNTAIN… It would appear my young hunting buddy hiked hard one day and chafed his thighs and was on the edge of certain death, the first known fatality from diaper rash in history. I texted back that I would return to base and we would discuss options, one of which would be his suicide. To cut the long, pathetic story short we hiked out the next day, one party delighted, one extremely disgusted, with himself, for being so stupid.
After a full day to get home and drop him off I was in a quandary, I had four days before I needed to be home for about a week to handle a huge turn-around in llamas. The logistics nightmare was just killing me, what with two days of travel needed to gain two days of hunting. Cold cruel logic demanded I just bite the bullet and set up muzzle loading elk camp while I still had some llamas to do the heavy lifting, so this is what I did. Then I came home, sent out one wave of llamas, hiked in, killed a nice bull, hiked out, took in, and sent out, another wave of llamas, then absconded with three to go pack out my bull’s three hundred forty pounds of meat on my dog, my back, and on my three llamas. Did I fail to mention that on the day I got my bull my (other) dog popped out fourteen puppies? Life was really getting in the way of this sheep adventure! The hits to my “plan” were coming in like punches from Ali after he got done rope-a-doping… The final blow came when a llama came in with a hernia, I covered the shortage, barely but it required my presence for more days.

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Finally it was over and all my kids were back in the pasture eating grass, I grabbed three good ones and headed right back to where I left off, two days later was looking at a very white basin without a sheep track in it.
Three days of hiking out across the steep hillside and it was obvious that they had moved, all the sign was at least a couple weeks old. It was time to move to the south point of the mountain where I had been at the beginning of the hunt. I got there just in time to set up in a pouring rainstorm that went on all night until turning to a blizzard at dawn the next day. The sheep rocks had an inch of ice under four inches of snow when it was all done. My llamas were starving, as all the food was covered, I knew each stitch of my tent by name, this was a rough several days. When the next storm rolled in I let discretion/depression get the best of me, and we slid and fell ten miles back to the truck. The llamas slid right off of the trail on numerous occasions as it was about one inch of glare ice, fortunately they had light loads so they were able to bounce right back up without being hurt. As we had this much trouble on a nice trail (I fell quite a few times too) it was probably a wise choice to retreat from the sheep chutes.


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[squirrel]

It was time for plan "c"

 

[squirrel]

DSC05726 by squirrel2012, on Flickr

I positioned myself to hunt uphill to the sheep from a southerly/southwesterly exposure instead of dropping in from above, from a northern exposure. It required nearly eight thousand feet of vertical daily, so steep so as to require daylight to be anywhere near safe. Spiking up to stay was not workable as my animals needed tending every day, and there was no trail to take them with me. Again my failure at proper logistics just killed me; I needed a camp keeper in a huge way. I did get next to eight ewes/lambs and a small ram one day, bedded about a hundred yards away, and got to witness an extremely intriguing show when they were threatened by a huge, mature golden eagle.
They were bedded in scattered formation over a circle roughly thirty yards across when he showed up riding in on the headwind about five to six feet above the sheep, they bolted into a tight circle shoulders almost touching, lambs on the inside of the sheep sandwich, as he made maybe fifteen or twenty passes just above their heads trying to spook them into panicking and breaking formation. They followed his every move and never broke ranks in the slightest, until he finally gave up and flew off to find dumber prey. I thought this defensive display was fascinating, never heard of it or saw it before. After he was gone they returned to their beds.


DSC05722 by squirrel2012, on Flickr

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This was my last encounter of the season as the eight thousand feet of climbing was not something I could do every day, the lack of conditioning (and 55 birthdays) bit me in the ass. I headed home without a sheep with a couple days left in the season, a failure of mental toughness, brought about by a lack of physical toughness and some very bad logistical mistakes. I had some great days in sheep country, about three weeks in total, set high standards of what an acceptable sheep was to be, as I already have four on the wall. But, man, that country just ate me whole and spit me out in pieces. I’ve hunted them with a recurve, a compound, a rifle, and a wifle, and this is the first tag I have had to eat, I still haven’t boiled it up yet, I think it will have a bitter after taste, unless I let it hang and age for a spell.
I was reading a war book once, pretty sure it was German on WWII, and his theory was that in anything close to an even battle the outcome has been decided before the first shots are even fired, by the quartermasters, supply clerks, requisitions people and the truck drivers. Much the same holds true for wilderness adventures, logistics and planning are the keys to success in back country hunting, followed very closely by toughness both physical and mental, but especially mental, as my initial hunting partner learned. Of course, with perfect hindsight clarity, I now know I should have used my llamas to set up supply bases then retreated and boarded them in safe pastures, returning with no duties other than to chase sheep to the best of my ability, following them anywhere I was capable of going, returning to my supply depots as needed, and of course the first segment should have been done solo.
The country was beautiful and rough, the sheep magnificent, if somewhat scarce, the small animals and birds fascinating to watch, the lakes crystal clear and full of big trout, with not a boot track nor fire ring to be seen, and certainly no salmon egg jars or snarls of monofilament on the shoreline. It was yet another fantastic adventure, it just didn’t end up with a taxidermy bill. But like the wife told me at each opportunity if I was dumb enough to call her, they taste like shit and the wall is full, what do you want to kill one for anyway? I just do, honey, I just do…



There it is guys, sorry it didn't end with a dead sheep! Sometimes it happens when going with a pointy stick...

 

[bobbydean]

Enjoyed !!!

 

[Dave N]

Thanks for sharing the journey and those pics were absolutely awesome!

 

[Art Vandeley]

Awesome post.. Congrats on the nice bull

 

[Irrelevant]

Thank you, that was very enjoyable to read.

 

[Matt/VT]

Fantastic adventure- thank you!

 

[TRS_Montana]

Man, for most people I know, the only way I'd hear about how a hunt like that went would be in a eulogy. Sounds like a pretty sweet adventure, ram or not! Thanks for sharing, and nice bull!