We'd spent long, hard days with little sleep. Our feet and bodies were battered and sore. The hunt was over, but we still had a lot of work to do. Gear had to be cleaned and dried, the tents needed to be pitched so they could dry out before storing, and bloody backpacks needed to be disassembled and washed. Our sheep meat needed to be cut up, wrapped and put in the freezer. Rifles needed to be cle...  Read More

The next morning, we followed the small stream down until we found our packs. By the time we broke down our spike camp and carried that and our sheep up to our main camp, hours of hard labor were behind us. But we weren't finished yet. We were on a brutal, bone-jarring trail with the ATV's heavily loaded- often off-balance and in danger of tipping. There was a good deal of winching, lifting, pushi...  Read More

We had a good idea of where to find our tent. But by the time we stumbled across it in the dark, it was 1:20 AM. This had been a very long day. We were soaked with rain on the outside and drenched with sweat underneath. My feet were raw, and as I crouched to get into my tent I wasn't sure if my shoulders, hips or legs hurt worse.But on the inside I was smiling. We had two rams. This had been a gre...  Read More

By the time we spotted our rams, climbed up to them, and finally had all the meat and horns and capes packed, it was somewhere between 10 and 11 PM. By the time we got off the mountain and then down the valley to the end of the ridge, it was after midnight. It was dark, we had no flashlight or headlamps, and we knew that we might have problems finding our tent in the next valley. We dropped our pa...  Read More

There were two big rams. We took careful aim, quietly counted to three and fired. We cringed as we watched the rams fall through the air for perhaps a 100 feet, land, tumble and freefall again. Everything happened so quickly that we didn't even consider the cliffs beneath us. Believe me, we considered them now. We had no way to drop off this ridgeline to our sheep at any point. We would have to fo...  Read More

As we continued to sidehill in the shale just beneath the clouds, the ridgeline above us got closer and closer as it 'ramped' lower and lower in elevation. While there was zero visibility in the clouds, there was perfect visibility just beneath them. We hated walking in this direction because the eight rams we were after had disappeared over the saddle behind us the day before. We finally reached ...  Read More

We stood in the deep fog having a quiet conversation. If we moved forward and the rams were near us, there was a good chance we'd scare them completely out of the country. It was a chance we weren't willing to take. We decided to lose elevation to get under the fog, so we side-hilled through rock and shale to a lower ridgeline. We were literally walking just under a thick canopy of clouds. Sometim...  Read More

Though raining, we had good visibility in the valley, but the tops of the mountains where we were headed were socked in with clouds. By the time we reached a high saddle we were standing in those wet clouds and could only see 15 or 20 feet through the foggy mist. This is the place we'd seen the rams disappear the day before, but on this day they could have been standing 50 yards from us and we wou...  Read More

My sheep hunting partner, Dan, is a lot tougher than I am. I tend to try to sit out the rain, waiting for it to clear. He gets up and goes. Of course, I follow- because as a man, I must. I can't stand the thought of someone enduring hardship that I'm not willing to endure. It was day two. We'd carried a 'spike camp' off in the direction where we'd seen rams run and disappear the day before. The gi...  Read More

It was by far the biggest dall sheep I had ever seen. The massive horns were the result of both age and genetics. We had spotted a band of rams on the top of a 'pinnacle' mountain several miles away and were simply making our way towards them. This ram surprised us. Suddenly it was right there- just above us- easy rifle range. We were thinking of flipping a coin to see which of us would be the luc...  Read More

Heavy frost and stars shining brilliantly against a black sky. The Big Dipper is directly overhead and looks almost close enough to touch. In less than 2 hours we'll have a beautiful sunrise. Jesus once criticized people saying that they could read the signs in the sky and know the coming weather, but couldn't read the spiritual signs that were all around them. It's true. While America's depravity...  Read More

As I did the calculations in my mind, I thought I could drop those 20 trees in about an hour. This was good because that was all the time I had. I was wrong. The hillside was steep, lumpy, and had high brush and devil's club. Near the valley floor, the ground had little pockets of water that didn't even seem to have a bottom. At times I couldn't even stand up on the side of the tree where I needed...  Read More