When looking for someone to share a sheep hunting adventure with it is well advised to pick your partner carefully. The reality of hunting out of a backpack in the mountains means at a minimum you will be sharing everything from gear and the daily work down to toothpaste, TP, and a tiny tent. Knowing your personal limitations, strengths, and weaknesses should go without saying but being fully confident in your partner is key to not only having a good time, it could also mean the difference between surviving and not if a turd happens to hit the oscillating wind machine far from help.

This particular adventure was quite a few years in the making. It wasn’t so much that I had a hard time finding someone to who was interested but rather I knew who I wanted to make this hunt happen with and it took us a while to line the stars up and hatch the plan.

I can’t imagine having had a better partner for this mission. Andy is as solid as they come and I was sincerely worried about being the weak link in the chain, primarily because I was. Andy is a certified assassin, fit as a fiddle, strong as an ox and the nicest damn guy I think I’ve ever met. In school his nickname was “the specimen” and he finished first in all pursuits both mental and physical. He’s endlessly optimistic and is an encyclopedia when it comes to hunting and Alaska. This would be the first sheep hunt either of us had been on. We had no expectations and sure didn’t plan on bringing home meat but rather were treating the trip as a learning opportunity where we would gather information and learn more about the animals and strategy with the hopes of continuing to fill in knowledge and experience to eventually “succeed” down the road. Expectation management is key and while our hopes were certainly much higher, we are both painfully aware of how slow the learning curve can be for these types of pursuits.

The planning started in earnest about a year ago when we made a short list of potential destinations. Our priorities revolved more around time and money in trying to pick a spot and develop a strategy. Neither of us have much of either (time or money) to throw around these days and we wanted to narrow the options down to one that would allow us to hike in instead of having to fly and allow us to cover a fair amount of ground in the 7 days we had to hunt.

Several options became one good one and soon enough it was time to launch. As my work and personal life usually dictate, I worked for a few weeks straight with barely a minute to breathe leading right up to the minute I tossed bags in the truck and headed south to rendezvous with Andy at the trailhead. Between the beginning of August and early October I spent two nights in my own bed. Summer tends to keep me on the move and as per the norm I did the duffle bag shuffle for most of the summer and lived in the dirt more often than not.

The vast majority of the sheep taken in the general season in Alaska get killed in the first week to ten days of the season. Being unable to get away for the opening day we were bringing up the rear so to speak and felt a little in the hole from the outset. The area we had planned to hunt is fairly accessible in the front-range at least and we knew that it would have been busy for the opening week. We had hoped that the first wave of hunters would be headed out by the time we headed in and that we’d have a bit of real estate to ourselves. Another component of our strategy was to try and hike farther, higher, and harder than the competition to get into some terrain that wouldn’t have been touched by others.



Two guys nuts-to-butt on one four wheeler doesn't exactly scream masculinity


We left the trailhead intending to drive a 4-wheeler as far as we could up a drainage and the set out with 8 days of food and fuel up the drainage and over a few passes into some more remote country.

My pack was feeling pretty healthy at the trailhead. I’d call it 65lbs pretty easily. I’d gone heavy on food, which I always do. There are a few things I don’t mind running out of, toilet paper for example, but I get pretty cranky without grub. The first few days would be a bitch no doubt about it with the majority of our elevation gain coming before we would have a chance to eat our packs lighter.

The ramble up the lower part of the creek drainage was pretty uneventful and we made good, quick progress. We popped out of the creek at one point to scout the route ahead and I had a seat to look around and eat something. Being quite a ways from what we thought would be prime real estate neither of us were in hunting mode really but were more intent on the commute. As I sat and starting digging through my snack bag I pickup up four white dots on a distant slope not far from where our route should eventually take us. I put the scope on them and sure enough, four sheep were crossing a bowl a few miles north of us and headed towards our drainage. Suddenly we were in the game and entirely unprepared for what to do next. Our mental model had been hike for a few days to get off the beaten path and then start climbing every peak, ridge, and high point in the area and let the glass do the walking from there. After a bit of head scratching it was obvious we had to have a closer look at these sheep. We were sheep hunting after all.




View from the commute



This scenario would play out a few times over the course of the next week. See sheep a long way off, get close enough to see if they have horns, get close enough to see if they are legal, make a call to go after them or give up based on size or circumstance.

Almost without exception the open season for sheep hunting is for rams that are either 1) full curl on at least 1 side, 2) have 8 growth rings (annuli) or ,3) have the tips of both horns broken. So that is what we were after here.

We dropped our gear and scrambled up the closest high point hoping for a better look. Through the scope I was fairly certain I could see horns but they were at least four miles away and so it was a little hard to tell. After some deliberation I was convinced they were rams and we took the bare essentials and went for a closer look.

The terrain leading across the flats and into the foothills was rolling and offered us decent cover, not that we were worried about getting busted from so far away, but still better to be cautious. A few miles and an hour or two later we were close enough to get a better look at horns and see if any might be pushing legal. Two of the four looked to be close so we had to keep going. Across the flats and now into steeper terrain our pace had slowed as we had to be much more careful about staying hidden from sight. We were still a mile or more from the sheep but had to pick our route carefully following micro drainages up a broad face using the ridges above or cover. The plan was to get even with the sheep and then work our way across a face that would put us at about 150 yards from them by our estimation.



The bachelor flock we got within 80 yards of on our first day



Another hour or two went by and we were almost into the position we were aiming for and we went into stealth mode, creeping and crawling and using micro features to conceal ourselves without having seen the animals for some time. We thought we had a good idea where they were bedded down but we had no idea if they had moved since we’d last seen them. Andy was in the lead as we poked our noses over a slight rise and there they were, four rams at about 80 yards. We had hoped to wind up just above them but we were exactly level with them on the slope. They busted us instantly but didn’t bolt. We got a good, long, hard look at them and one was super close to being legal but we couldn’t quite put him at full curl. He may have been but from our angle he looked like 7/8ths and neither of us wanted to cut it that close. We needed a sure thing and I had left my horn stretcher at home. We watched the rams and they watched us as they nervously gained elevation and worked their way into a rock band and into a position that they were fairly confident that they were safe in. Being that close to such proud creatures was inspiring.

We were pumped. Day one and we’d already put the sneak on a few rams and felt like we were in the game far sooner than we had anticipated. The elation was soon replaced remembering that we were five miles from our packs, which were still eight miles from where we had hoped to be at the end of the day and it was already early evening. We hightailed it off the side of the mountain back into the flats and tried to keep our tired legs moving at a quick pace back to our packs. An hour or two of effort had us back to our gear. We loaded up with far less enthusiasm for heavy burdens than we started the day with and retraced many of our steps back up the drainage towards the pass where we planned to cross into another valley the next day.




Back to our packs and headed towards where we had hoped to camp on night one



The going was straightforward but it still felt like work with good-sized loads. We humped as far as we could until our legs were done and made a hasty camp next to a small creek. Hot water in dry food made dinner and we were all but ready for the sack. As we were heating water, lounging on the moss and blueberry covered tundra a group of lambs and ewes crossed a ridge above us and started grazing in an open bowl high above. It was a magical sight in the pastel light of dusk.

Steelhead fishing has taught me that very often it pays to put in one last effort, one last cast, one last gear change, or to poke around one more bend in the river. After a long hard day, especially one that has been unproductive, it can be hard to maintain enthusiasm, but I have had that one last effort pay off so many times that I can’t ignore it.

With light fading fast we were more than ready to sack out but I suggested an quick stroll just up the hill above camp to get a look at our path for the morning and to get a slightly different perspective on a few of the angled valleys that fed into the one we were in. From the top of the knoll we had a decent view of the pass we would cross in the morning. Other than the lambs and ewes above camp we didn’t see any other signs of life and we were just about to head back when we both put our binos up for a quick scan of the terrain far beyond the pass. As we did we both spotted two white dots near the top of a prominent gray peak some 6-7 miles distant. Curious.

In my observations of them, quite often rams hang out in smaller bachelor flocks, two and threes are common, sometimes a few more. They almost always prefer a position or vantage point that is well above whatever lambs and ewes may be in the area. They bed high above their food source and venture down to feed when they are fairly comfortable and convinced that it is safe to do so. The position of these sheep, that there were just two of them, and that they seemed to have decent body mass all pointed to them being rams. You never know until you get close, but we had hope, which is a good thing to have when going to bed in sheep country.




Home sweet home



To be continued.