Even though I had a cast on my leg, I had a 12 gauge and a 30.06 in my truck, with my bird dog 'Tucker' sitting on the front seat beside me. It was winter, the temperature was below zero, and there was at least 3 feet of a soft snow on the ground. I was driving the road looking for ptarmigan, grouse, fox or wolves north of Paxson, Alaska. I parked my truck at the base of a high ridge, looked up, a...  Read More

As a young man I was utterly directionless. I lived as though the world revolved around me. I was concerned with my immediate pleasure and honestly never even considered a future responsibility to earn a living or care for a family. When you live that way (as though everything is about you) it's impossible to move forward. You stand still- the world is spinning- and eventually you begin to sink. M...  Read More

I once read that Mark Twain said, "The boy who picks up a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way." As funny as the thought is, it would actually benefit us if all of life's lessons could be learned that quickly. That boy would go from mischief to an immediate and overwhelming FEAR along with PAIN and perhaps a few SCARS. From this moment forward, that boy will have a reverent...  Read More

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