Well I have finally had time to archive all my thoughts and pictures to put together a hunt recap for my Alaska Dall Sheep hunt. This has always been one of my bucket list hunts, since I was an 8-year-old boy reading about hunting adventures across the globe in the various sporting magazines my father had laying around the house. Those magazines and books lit a fire to explore the world hunting, with the north American sheep slam high on the list of hunting goals. For the first 15 years of my professional life, I have mainly hunted in Texas with a few travel trips for elk and deer outside the state, but the end goal always to start hunting other parts of the world. With a hard focus and determination on building a business and supporting my family, I have finally reached the point where I can turn some of those dreams into reality.
This hunt really started back in January of 2021 when I booked the hunt. I had visited with numerous outfitters in Canada and Alaska regarding hunting Dall sheep. Those conversations started in 2019, and while I was leaning towards hunting the Northwest territories, there was always the lingering thought in my mind that Alaska had the biggest sheep, as evidenced by the record books. However, the success rates in Alaska were lower, the competition for good rams was higher, and the sheep numbers appeared to be in decline. Thus, I was leaning towards Canada…..but the Covid hit, and Canada all but shut down. Not knowing how the outfitters would survive the Canadian politics associated with Covid, and my desire to get the hunt booked, I decided to drop the Canada idea and move my focus back to Alaska. I had narrowed it down to two outfitters in Alaska already, so I visited a bit more and put the deposit down with the outfitter I had the most comfort with, in an area I really wanted to hunt. Out of respect to the outfitter (per his request), I will not post the name of the outfitter or the location in Alaska I was hunting. I will respond to PMs if there is an interest, but given the challenges with low sheep numbers and quality, he prefers to keep the area he hunts quiet, and I will respect that.
I booked the hunt for the first 10-days of September 2023. Most people want to hunt the opening week of the season, but I didn’t have any heartburn hunting later in the year, as I was hoping to hunt for rams that worked their way out of the nasty areas that were inaccessible early in the year, and I wanted a ram with a longer coat later in the season. For 2+ years I worked on getting myself into shape and ensuring I had the gear I wanted. In 2022, I was lucky enough to draw a elk tag in NM and got to test some of the gear I had accumulated as well as put my fitness to the test. I was successful on that hunt and was happy with how everything performed (myself included), but I knew deep down that the NM mountains were child splay compared to what I would likely encounter in Alaksa (and that intuition was correct).
From September 2022 to August 2023, I dedicated myself to a combination of exercises including heavy pack training, peloton bike rides, bleacher rucks, thousands of lunges and squats, focused work on my Core and Yoga to increase my flexibility. All of these would be extremely beneficial to my success on the hunt, but ultimately you just cannot be in good enough shape before you go on one of these hunts. Its just not possible to prepare for what the mountains will demand of you living in Texas. With that said, below is a day-by-day recap of the best hunt of my life, and one I will cherish forever. I am hopeful that writing this will inspire others to chase a dream like this and will also be a story my kids can open up and read to my grandkids and great grandkids long after I am gone, as these types of adventure may be harder to come by in the future.
Day 1 (8/29/2023) – departure day
Arrive at DFW Airport, with plans to fly from Dallas to Seattle to Fairbanks. Flight leaves at 6am, so get to the airport at 4am when baggage check opens at Alaska Airlines. I am 6th in line but have two families with dogs in front of me. Both families take a good 20-30 minutes to get the dogs checked, so at 5am I am finally checking my firearms and bags. I declare the firearm and fill out all the paperwork and check the bags. Everything goes smoothly from there with no TSA hassles and I make it to my gate for boarding. The air tags I placed in my checked bags show the bags made it on the plane, which is a big sigh of relief. Before I know it, I am facetiming my wife and kids before they get ready for school, then am shutting down the phone and going wheels up! I watch an amazing sunrise, then pay for some internet and do some work the remainder of the flight to Seattle.
The layover at Seattle airport was uneventful with lots of hunters coming and going. While taking some work calls and sending some emails, I hear stories of successful sheep and caribou hunts through the terminal, along with quite a few hunters talking excitedly about their Caribou or moose trips they are flying to. My flight ended up having about 12-14 hunters on it traveling to Fairbanks, so I guess it was the good-old-boys club. As I board the plane from Seattle to Fairbanks, I get that uneasy feeling in my stomach that comes from having a gun traveling through a liberal cities airport, but that ends up being an unfounded concern, as the air tags once again show the gun case and bag both on the flight to Fairbanks before we go wheels up! Another 4.5 hour flight completed with a mix of working and staring out the window at beautiful country and I land in Alaska around 4 PM AST.
I gather my bags and head to Pikes Lodge in Fairbanks not far from the airport. I take a quick trip to grab a burger and beer for dinner, grab a small bottle of crown for the mountain in case I am successful and then check in with my outfitter to discuss logistics. I check in with my Wife and then call it a night.
Day 2 (8/30/2023) – Alaska Travel Day
The plan was for me to take a 207 to from Fairbanks to a smaller town near I would be hunting, and then stay the night at a small hotel there, with the intent to fly out to the hunting camp the following day. However, the hunters before me were all successful and elected to fly out early, and therefore my outfitter was only waiting on me to get in. I was to be the only hunter in camp from September 1-7, with moose hunters coming in on the 8th and 12th respectively. My flight was leaving Fairbanks at 1pm, and before I hopped on that flight, my outfitter called me and said he was meeting me that afternoon when I got into town, and rather than staying at the hotel, he was going to fly me out to basecamp. To say I was pumped would be an understatement! I got to fly in the 207 with two other hunters heading to other outfitter camps, and we say some beautiful scenery and quite a few bull moose that had just rubbed out.
1.5 hours later and we landed in the small town with my outfitter waiting for me on the runway. We ran 2 quick errands in town, broke down all my gear and loaded it into his super cub. Within an hour, we were flying out to basecamp. The super cub flight was an awesome experience flying over some of the most amazing country I had seen yet. It took about an hour to get to base camp, where there were some of the comforts of home. A cook tent, some large arctic oven tents, an outhouse, and a field shower! This was far more than I expected for the basecamp, and it was reassuring to know the outfitter I chose put together a very clean, tight camp. At this point, it was about 5pm AST, and I was introduced to my Guide for the week, Ben. Ben was a former D2 offensive lineman that had lost a lot of weight and had the stride of a giant. I knew he was the type of guide that would push me, and boy did he ever!
We did all the paperwork for licenses and tags in camp (I purchased as sheep tag and a grizzly tag), and after some discussions, my outfitter mentioned that there was weather showing to come in overnight and through the next morning. He then looked at me the guide and said “you boys are going out to spike camp tonight, we aren’t waiting on this weather to sock us in basecamp”. So, with that, I was getting flown out to spike camp! Ben flew out first and I followed. On my flight, I saw the wreckages of a cub that crashed back in the 80’s where the pilot and passenger passed away (they didn’t make it over a pass in some bad weather), and also saw a group of 4 rams on a mountain that my outfitter said likely were not legal. We were dropped off in a high alpine valley/drainage that evening. We pitched our tents, cooked a mountain house, and glassed two groups of ewe’s/lambs with a total of 16 sheep. Since we got in that evening, we could officially start hunting the next day, a day ahead of schedule. I got to witness one of the most amazing sunsets in Gods country I have ever seen, and slept under the stars with a small tinge of the northern lights. Around 4am, we got some sleet and winds, but the weather didn’t come in like we expected. I struggled to sleep given the anticipation of what the next day held for us, but did get some sleep.
Day 3 (8/31/2023) – Hunting Begins!
In talking with my guide Ben, I learned he had been guiding for 6 years in this area and had guided 9 successful sheep hunts in that time. He had guided in most of the areas of the exclusive use concession my outfitter operated, but the area we were hunting was the only area he had not personally guided. They didn’t run many hunters in the area I would be hunting due to how rugged it was and the physical requirements required to hunt it. My outfitter knew I had been working hard to get in shape, and I was about 20 years younger than the average client, so he wanted me to hunt it knowing there were likely a few good old rams that were never pressured. Ben had always wanted to hunt the area and was excited to tackle it with me. The plan was to hike down the drainage we camped at the head of to about half way down (3 miles or so) and set up camp near water on a flatter spot, then daily we would climb over a pass about 2,750 feet in elevation above our camp to get to a ridgeline, and run that ridgeline to check various major and minor drainages. Seemed reasonable enough until I learned how much loose shale was involved in the ascent to the pass!
We packed up camp with food and water and made our hike down to our new spike camp location. When we got there, we ran into our first problem…..no water. The option was to hike back up to where we were dropped off and load up out 10 Liter water bladders with high alpine lake water, or to hike another 1-1.5 miles down the drainage to where we believed there was running water. We set up camp and knew we had enough water for the day, so we elected to set up camp and hike up to the pass. In doing this, we would glass further down the drainage to see if there was water further down, or if we needed to head back up to the lake. As we were leaving camp, the weather was beautiful. We left the gravel bar and headed up a small drainage towards a ridgeline that would funnel us up to the saddle we were looking to pass over. When we rounded the corner, much to my surprise, was a big healthy Mare. Ben got a big grin on this face and turned to me excitedly. He said he had heard stories about this mare but didn’t know if we would get to see her. She has been living in this valley alone for at least 15 years, having gotten away from a pack string. The previous outfitter saw her their first year in the area, which was 15 years ago, so she is definitely a tough old girl. She looked healthy and while she wouldn’t let us touch her, we got pretty close and she was very docile. It was such a cool experience to see her in that natural state.
Once we got done playing around with her, we restarted our ascent up the mountain. My pack wasn’t that heavy, but the altitude was kicking my butt, the hills were steep, and the shale was moving under my feet every step. I’m not sure how the old times did this without trekking poles, but I do know that I wouldn’t want to do it without them. On our way up we did spot water about a mile further down the drainage from camp, which was much better thana 3-mile hike back up to the lake, so we had our plan for water moving forward. After about 2.5 hours of climbing, we were approaching the saddle. The last 500 yards required walking a sheep trail side hilling a 40-degree rock slope which was a bit unnerving for this flatlander. As we approached the sheep trial, the winds began to pick up, and we were fighting gusts north of 50 MPH. We finally made it to the saddle and started to glass some of the drainages on the backside while we ate a mountain lunch. We were glassing four rams about 3 miles away in another drainage as the winds continued to pick up. Ben and I started to look at each other when the winds were not relenting, and he then decided to check his inreach weather. The results were not favorable……the mountain was calling for sustained winds the next 24 hours at 45-50 MPH, with gusts over 90 MPH. We spent another 30 minutes trying to glass the rams at a distance, but the wind was too much to keep the tripod steady, and we could only tell that two of the rams had good mass and would likely be close, but we didn’t have a definitive answer. The winds were too strong to try and move down the ridgeline to glass other fingers, and we decide to bail off back down to camp.
1.5 hours later and we were back to camp with sore legs and wind-beaten faces. But the work was just beginning! We both had 3-season tents, and unfortunately in the flat spot we had decided to camp was also in the middle of a wind tunnel, with the wind screaming down the valley. Our tents were getting pummeled by 60-70 MPH winds and we both knew this likely wasn’t going to work for the night. We elected to break down camp and pack it further down the valley near water, and try to set up behind a portion of the mountain that might act as a wind break. About 2 hours later and we were re-setup in a more sheltered area and with water. Even with the wind break, it was a long night. I was running a Hilleberg Niak and Ben as running a Big Agnes Copper Spur, and while both tents held up, they were fully bent over more than once. We both tied on additional guide-wires via paracord and tied those off to rocks and Alders, and placed rocks over our stakes. While that did help, the tents barely held up, on numerous occasions the vestibules caved in and the main tents would lay over on us, with the fabric slapping us in the face. Ben guides on the peninsula for Brown bears, and on more than one occasion let out an expletive filled rant along the lines of “that his F******* peninsula hunt for bears wasn’t supposed to start for another month, and this $*** needed to stop.” He emphatically stated this was by far the worst wind he had dealt with in the interior in his years hunting. We didn’t sleep very well that night.
Day 2 (9/1/2023)
We wake up to calmer winds in the valley, but the winds are still there. The forecast calls for winds up on the mountain up to 80 MPH that morning, with the winds subsiding mid-day and getting some calm weather that afternoon. The weather was also calling for snow that night, and we were hopeful that was wrong. But the Garmin weather was far more accurate than the DFW weathermen, so I think I know what I will be checking for weather the rest of my days.
We made a cup of coffee and had a granola breakfast meal to start the day. We planned out the day and decided we were going to go up a saddle further east (down the drainage) today to check 5 different drainages downstream of what we looked at the day before. This would require about 3,000 feet of climbing to get over the saddle, along with running a few ridges that had some dicey country that was very vertical. Ben told me he could get me through it, and he was right. I was gaining some confidence this second day and we were able to successfully navigate it. My lungs were doing better on day 2 and my legs still felt good, but my boots were causing some pain in my Achilles. I decided the only solution was to start popping Motrin and fight thought the discomfort, as well as Leukotape the pain points. This proved to be an effective strategy that would work throughout the course of the trip.
We made it to the top in about 2.5 hours and then spent the next 6 hours glassing drainages. The winds were high, and at points we definitely had gusts over 50 MPH, but they did die down to a more reasonable 20-30 MPH speed that afternoon. We glassed three drainages with no sheep, which surprised both of us, as there was sheep sign everywhere. While we were eating lunch between glassing drainages, we were surprised to see a wolverine pop his head over a rock about 200 yards away and give us a 20-second stare down. Once he realized he couldn’t take us, he scurried away. I wasn’t expecting to get to see a wolverine, so that was a special experience. After that surprise at lunch, we decided to work to the fourth drainage via the backside of a ridge to stay hidden. With it being early afternoon and the sun being out, the thermals were carrying up and the wind was in our face. Out of nowhere, the wind switched 180 degrees and started blowing out over the drainage. We both looked at each other and just stopped, laying down on the backside of the ridge. We waited about 10 minutes for the wind to settle down, then we creeped up and looked into the drainage. Our worst nightmare had come true, we saw three rams about 500 yards out and they were working away from us. We put the glass on them and none of them were legal, but they were blowing out of the country. We watched them for 10 minutes or so as they worked their way towards the last drainage we were headed to check. As they rounded the corner out of site, we caught movement to our left and four more rams that we couldn’t previously see were now also working out of the drainage the opposite direction, back towards the drainages we had already checked. There was a shooter in this group, and I wanted to throw up. He was full curl on his left side and was shorter on this right. He wasn’t a monster, but he was a good legal Ram.
We ended up following this group of rams for the next 3 hours as they worked their way across 3 drainages, untimely entering the country we planned to hunt the next day. We knew we were going to catch up to them, so we were just trying to put them to bed. Once they went into the country that we were going to hunt the next day, we gave up on the dream of putting them to bed, and instead elected to go back down to camp, as there was only about 2 hours of daylight left. We had put on about 8 miles and 5,000 of elevation gain for the day when it was all said and done. My legs were tired, my stomach empty and I was emotionally beat after screwing up on the ram, but I knew we still had 9 days of hunting. I was thankful to be in gods country, and seeing a shooter ram was awesome! We both went to bed very tired and humbled.
Day 3 (9/2/2023)
Did I mention Garmin Weather was accurate?!?!? Well we ended up getting about 4-5” of snow overnight at our camp, and the tops of the mountains got close to 12”, just as the forecast called for. Our saving grace was that the sun was to come out around 9am, and temps were supposed to get up into the mid-40’s, so we were hopeful it would melt off. Given the technical nature of the hiking we had to do, we didn’t feel it was safe to traverse the mountain with deep snow. So we elected to stay in camp for the morning. We made coffee and breakfast and rested our legs. While sitting with Ben between our tents drinking our second cups of coffee I noticed movement over his shoulder. Up on the mountain about 250 yards away was a Sow Grizzly with a single cub. The cub was an older cub (probably 2 years old), and when they noticed us, they turned tail and hauled off the other way. Given what I have read, it was a good sign that hey hauled butt away, which is an indication they wouldn’t be a nuisance the rest of the trip.
The weather was improving, but the sun didn’t come out like we expected, so the whole day ended up being a non-sheep-hunting day as we couldn’t safely navigate the mountain. We elected to hike 2 miles back up the main valley and hike up a hill to glass the valley for bears the rest of the day given I had a grizzly tag. We didn’t turn anything but, but did have lots of good conversations on hunting, life, family, sports, etc. It was a good day to let my legs recuperate as well. In our discussions that afternoon, we had been looking at the maps on the Garmin and had identified an area up on top of the mountain that might allow us to pitch our tents and save us the 2500-3000 daily climb. We both decided it was worth it to try and make that happen, but also knew there was no water up there. So our plan was to pack up spike camp that next morning with all of our food, and for each of us to carry 13- liters of water up the mountain with our gear to get camp set up high, which would allow us 3-days up top without having to drop back down for water. This would require us hiking up with about 85 lbs. on our back. With the shale and knife ridges, I knew this was going to take a lot of my mental and physical strength, so I decided to eat the most calorically dense free-dried dinner I had in an effort to prepare for the next day.
Day 4 (9/3/2023)
We wake up and I make a biscuits and gravy freeze dried breakfast and a cup of coffee. We let the sun come up to burn off the dew from our rain flies, and we load up all our food, water and camp into our packs and hike up the valley about a mile. From there, we start our vertical ascent up the mountain. It takes us 6 hours to get to our destination, but we make it. There were moments on that journey where I questioned my sanity with ice/snow still on loose rock. Man times boulders would roll out from under our feet and careen down hundreds of feet, gaining speed and knocking free other rocks. In my younger days before having a wife and kids I likely wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but having those loved ones at home made more conscious of some of the dumb things we were doing to kill a sheep. I kept telling myself “Curtis, if you are going to be dumb, at least be smart about it”. So I was as smart as I could be while navigating the terrain, taking some things painfully slow to ensure I didn’t make a mistake.
We got camp set up and then worked our way down a ridgeline and gained about 400 feet in elevation. WE set up the spotting scope and began glassing for sheep. With snow still on the mountain, finding white sheep had become more challenging, but within two hours we had found over 40 sheep within 5 miles of us. As we picked through them, we relocated the four rams from the first day and determined that one of them was legal, but the play was 4+ miles away and would require dropping 3K feet and then regaining about 2.5K feet. About 5 miles away there was a group of 5 rams we couldn’t tell much about, and we saw about 20 ewes and rams scattered about. Then we glassed directly below us about 1500 yards, and to our surprise found a group of 10 ewes lambs with a ?-curl ram in there with them. Finding a ram with Ewes is not common for this time of year, so Ben’s BS radar was going off. We spent the next hour watching them, and over time we found that there were three groups of rams around the ewes, and they were moving back and forth between a feeding area, a mineral lick and the only surface water within about a 5 mile radius. One of the groups of rams was the group we busted on day-2 with a shooter, the other was a group of three sub-legal rams, and the last was a pair of two shooter rams, one of them being a stud! We talked about what we could and couldn’t pull off that evening as far as a stalk, but ultimately there ended up being too many sheep eyes around and we decided it was best to return to camp, cook dinner, get our legs back under us and make a play the following day. We put the sheep to bed and then worked our way back to camp.
Day 5 (9/4/2023)
We woke up to high winds on the mountain and high spirits! We knew where the sheep had bedded, so we worked our way to our preferred glassing point to re-evaluate the situation that morning. The sheep had moved a bit, but were all still in the same general area. We found the two big rams along with the ewes and lambs, but couldn’t locate any of the other rams. Not a huge concern as we were focused on the big boys, but we did want to know where they were to make sure our stalk wasn’t busted by them. We watched the big boys for 2 hours while we waited for the thermals to shift up the mountain, as we wanted to approach them at a higher elevation and shoot across a canyon, getting within 400 yards. During this waiting game, I had a little visitor called an Ermin come visit me. Cute littel guy!
After 3 hours, it became apparent the winds weren’t going to cooperate, so we elected for plan B. We were going to leave camp up high and bomb off the backside of the mountain, giving up 3,000 FT of elevation. We would then work our way around two mountain fingers and back up the drainage, using a cutbank and alder for cover until we could reach a foothill that we could parallel, and then form there work up a the foothill about ? a mile to try and get within 400 yards. We left at 10am and made it down to the bottom around noon.
We ate a quick lunch, then continued the stalk. The rams were up on a precipice with a full view of the valley. So while we had the wind advantage, we were below them and they had the visual advantage. For those that haven’t hunted sheep, they have vision equivalent to an 8x binocular and are always looking down the mountain for danger, so its best to try and approach them from above. As discussed before, we gave up the high ground due to the wind as a calculated decision, and we would physically pay for it. We belly crawled at a painstakingly slow pace through alders and rock fields for 400 yards, we crouch walked along cutbanks for another 600 yards, all to get within 750 yards. We were hung up at 750, and getting closer would mean we had to cross a 80 yard opening with no cover completely in their view, which would have ended it all before it got started. As I mentioned, our goal was to cross this opening to get to the foothill for cover, but the timing had to be right. We waited for 1.5 hours for the rams to move off the precipice where they where chewing their cud, and when they did, we sprinted to the foothill and then began our climb. We gained about 250 feet in elevation while we closed from 750 yards to 400 yards. When we popped our head up over the foothill, we could only see one ram. I got prone with my rifle on my bipod and a pack lid under my buttstock and waiting for Ben to tell me which ram it was. Ben then whispered to me “it’s the big SOB and he is at 380 yards, kill him!” I dialed my scope to 375, and as I did so the ram go antsy. He moved back up the mountain about 10 yards and stopped to look, at which point I let the 300 win mag with 200 grain accubonds eat. It was a great shot but was behind the shoulder so it didn’t break him down like a shoulder or spine shot would. He ran up the mountain a few steps, so I racked another round and gave him a Texas heart shot. At this point he fell down the mountain a few yards, but picked his head up again, so I put one more in him behind the shoulder at a hard quarter. And just like that, the mountain monarch was down and I had my dram Dall ram.
4:21 PM AST, and my dream ram was on the ground. I sent in reach messages to my wife and Father, and then Ben and I headed up the mountain to check him out. It took us about 45 minutes to get to him 400 yards away given the terrain, but we made it. I got to put hands on my sheep, and at that moment I could unequivocally say that this ram is the most special animal I have ever hunted. The effort put into preparing to hunt him and the hunt itself to this point, along with the country he was hunted in, makes it unlike anything else I have done. I took about a half hour to reflect on how special this was and how much it meant to me, and then we got to work on him. We ended up rolling him about 200 feet down the mountain and then dragged him to a small area of muskeg that was relatively flat for photos and processing. It rained intermittently during the process, so we had to throw on rain gear, which would be a foreshadowing of what was ahead of us the remainder of the night.
We caped and quartered the ram out and then packed the horns, cape and meat about a half mile back up the mountain to get it away from the carcass. At this point, it was 8pm and we had about 1.5 hours of daylight left. We were a little over 2,000 feet below our camp in elevation with a big hike up through some loose scree and boulder fields. WE thought it would take 2.5-3.5 hours to get back up to camp, and would require headlamps. We were low on water (each had half a liter on us) with most of our water up at camp. WE discussed sleeping under a tarp in our hunting clothes versus making the climb back to camp. The weather was forecasted to drop into the high teens with sleet. I finally looked at Ben and said I would rather be wet, cold and miserable climbing in the dark so that I could have a full bottle of water and a warm sleeping bag than siwashing on the side of the mountain, so we put on our headlamps and started climbing. That 4-hour climb in the dark after a long day of hunting was one of the most mentally challenging things I have ever done. By the time we made it up top, I was out of water, sweating through my clothes, was getting sleeted on and we heavily bruised from quite a few trips/falls in the boulder and shale fields. I was almost delirious when we rolled back into camp in the sleet-storm at midnight. I got in my tent, changed out of my dirty clothes into my only other set of clothes, fired up the jet boil, made a quick dinner and downed 2 liters of water, and went to bed shivering and exhausted. I was borderline hypothermic, but my Wester Mountaineering bag got me warmed back up in pretty quick order.
As I shivered myself to sleep while my feet and legs cramped on me, I think I had the biggest grin on my face. Knowing that I had my sheep, a real cranker of a ram, and had accomplished one of my lifelong hunting dreams was enough to make me smile through any amount of pain and discomfort I was feeling.
Day 6 (9/5/2023)
We woke up to a sleet covered mountain and tents. Ben and I both agree we are sleeping until 9am, and then we will make a plan to get the ram off the mountain. After a cup of coffee and a freeze dried breakfast skillet breakfast, we make our plan.
Our options were twofold:
Day 7 (9/6/2023)
One would think that when the animal is killed the hunt is close to over. This day proved that to not be case! I took us 12 hours to make it from our spike camp to the landing strip. We covered 8 miles straight line distance, which was probably between 11-12 miles with elevation. We fought a mix of alders, spongy muskeg, shale, tussocks, streams crossing and anything else Alaska could throw at us, all while fighting with a 120-lb pack, and rifle and sheep horns. Our outfitter flew his cub into the landing strip to grab us with about an hour of light remaining and we took a 20 minute flight back to base camp. I got a hot shower than night, a big dinner made from moose, and got to sleep on a cot. I was in heaven!
This was the single most physically challenging day of my life, and I am happy to say I persevered, but likely not without some long-term damage. As I write this, I still don’t have feeling in my big toes due to nerve compression in my feet, and I am going to get an MRI to verify if I have a stress fracture in the talus bone of my left foot.
That said, would I do it again? Hell yes! I learned through this day and the previous days my body is capable of so much more than my mind thinks it is. Mental toughness allows us to reach our full physical potential, and my body persevered through some of the toughest crap I could imagine. My guide Ben said that while the hunt didn’t go 10 days, this was the most effort he had ever put into a sheep between the amount of climbing we did, the ruggedness of the country we attacked, and the pack out we performed.
Day 8 (9/7/2023)
We hang around camp and flesh my Ram’s cape and skull. We see that weather is coming in the next few days at base camp, so I elect to fly out that evening back to town rather than try to hunt a bear, as my wife has been holding down the fort with two young kids while I am away, and I know she can use the help at home. I say my goodbyes and my outfitter flies me back to town. On the flight I see 7 great moose and know if I ever choose to go hunt moose, he would be an outfitter to consider. I get into town and get a hotel and rearrange my flights home a few day early. I grab a pizza and get to watch a football game from the hotel room.
Day 9 (9/8/2023)
I make it back to Fairbanks mid-day, then get on the red-eyes from Fairbanks to Seattle to DFW. Make it home the next morning early enough to surprise the kids on Saturday with breakfast and cartoon time. To say I am a lucky man would be an understatement.
This hunt really started back in January of 2021 when I booked the hunt. I had visited with numerous outfitters in Canada and Alaska regarding hunting Dall sheep. Those conversations started in 2019, and while I was leaning towards hunting the Northwest territories, there was always the lingering thought in my mind that Alaska had the biggest sheep, as evidenced by the record books. However, the success rates in Alaska were lower, the competition for good rams was higher, and the sheep numbers appeared to be in decline. Thus, I was leaning towards Canada…..but the Covid hit, and Canada all but shut down. Not knowing how the outfitters would survive the Canadian politics associated with Covid, and my desire to get the hunt booked, I decided to drop the Canada idea and move my focus back to Alaska. I had narrowed it down to two outfitters in Alaska already, so I visited a bit more and put the deposit down with the outfitter I had the most comfort with, in an area I really wanted to hunt. Out of respect to the outfitter (per his request), I will not post the name of the outfitter or the location in Alaska I was hunting. I will respond to PMs if there is an interest, but given the challenges with low sheep numbers and quality, he prefers to keep the area he hunts quiet, and I will respect that.
I booked the hunt for the first 10-days of September 2023. Most people want to hunt the opening week of the season, but I didn’t have any heartburn hunting later in the year, as I was hoping to hunt for rams that worked their way out of the nasty areas that were inaccessible early in the year, and I wanted a ram with a longer coat later in the season. For 2+ years I worked on getting myself into shape and ensuring I had the gear I wanted. In 2022, I was lucky enough to draw a elk tag in NM and got to test some of the gear I had accumulated as well as put my fitness to the test. I was successful on that hunt and was happy with how everything performed (myself included), but I knew deep down that the NM mountains were child splay compared to what I would likely encounter in Alaksa (and that intuition was correct).
From September 2022 to August 2023, I dedicated myself to a combination of exercises including heavy pack training, peloton bike rides, bleacher rucks, thousands of lunges and squats, focused work on my Core and Yoga to increase my flexibility. All of these would be extremely beneficial to my success on the hunt, but ultimately you just cannot be in good enough shape before you go on one of these hunts. Its just not possible to prepare for what the mountains will demand of you living in Texas. With that said, below is a day-by-day recap of the best hunt of my life, and one I will cherish forever. I am hopeful that writing this will inspire others to chase a dream like this and will also be a story my kids can open up and read to my grandkids and great grandkids long after I am gone, as these types of adventure may be harder to come by in the future.
Day 1 (8/29/2023) – departure day
Arrive at DFW Airport, with plans to fly from Dallas to Seattle to Fairbanks. Flight leaves at 6am, so get to the airport at 4am when baggage check opens at Alaska Airlines. I am 6th in line but have two families with dogs in front of me. Both families take a good 20-30 minutes to get the dogs checked, so at 5am I am finally checking my firearms and bags. I declare the firearm and fill out all the paperwork and check the bags. Everything goes smoothly from there with no TSA hassles and I make it to my gate for boarding. The air tags I placed in my checked bags show the bags made it on the plane, which is a big sigh of relief. Before I know it, I am facetiming my wife and kids before they get ready for school, then am shutting down the phone and going wheels up! I watch an amazing sunrise, then pay for some internet and do some work the remainder of the flight to Seattle.
The layover at Seattle airport was uneventful with lots of hunters coming and going. While taking some work calls and sending some emails, I hear stories of successful sheep and caribou hunts through the terminal, along with quite a few hunters talking excitedly about their Caribou or moose trips they are flying to. My flight ended up having about 12-14 hunters on it traveling to Fairbanks, so I guess it was the good-old-boys club. As I board the plane from Seattle to Fairbanks, I get that uneasy feeling in my stomach that comes from having a gun traveling through a liberal cities airport, but that ends up being an unfounded concern, as the air tags once again show the gun case and bag both on the flight to Fairbanks before we go wheels up! Another 4.5 hour flight completed with a mix of working and staring out the window at beautiful country and I land in Alaska around 4 PM AST.
I gather my bags and head to Pikes Lodge in Fairbanks not far from the airport. I take a quick trip to grab a burger and beer for dinner, grab a small bottle of crown for the mountain in case I am successful and then check in with my outfitter to discuss logistics. I check in with my Wife and then call it a night.
Day 2 (8/30/2023) – Alaska Travel Day
The plan was for me to take a 207 to from Fairbanks to a smaller town near I would be hunting, and then stay the night at a small hotel there, with the intent to fly out to the hunting camp the following day. However, the hunters before me were all successful and elected to fly out early, and therefore my outfitter was only waiting on me to get in. I was to be the only hunter in camp from September 1-7, with moose hunters coming in on the 8th and 12th respectively. My flight was leaving Fairbanks at 1pm, and before I hopped on that flight, my outfitter called me and said he was meeting me that afternoon when I got into town, and rather than staying at the hotel, he was going to fly me out to basecamp. To say I was pumped would be an understatement! I got to fly in the 207 with two other hunters heading to other outfitter camps, and we say some beautiful scenery and quite a few bull moose that had just rubbed out.
1.5 hours later and we landed in the small town with my outfitter waiting for me on the runway. We ran 2 quick errands in town, broke down all my gear and loaded it into his super cub. Within an hour, we were flying out to basecamp. The super cub flight was an awesome experience flying over some of the most amazing country I had seen yet. It took about an hour to get to base camp, where there were some of the comforts of home. A cook tent, some large arctic oven tents, an outhouse, and a field shower! This was far more than I expected for the basecamp, and it was reassuring to know the outfitter I chose put together a very clean, tight camp. At this point, it was about 5pm AST, and I was introduced to my Guide for the week, Ben. Ben was a former D2 offensive lineman that had lost a lot of weight and had the stride of a giant. I knew he was the type of guide that would push me, and boy did he ever!
We did all the paperwork for licenses and tags in camp (I purchased as sheep tag and a grizzly tag), and after some discussions, my outfitter mentioned that there was weather showing to come in overnight and through the next morning. He then looked at me the guide and said “you boys are going out to spike camp tonight, we aren’t waiting on this weather to sock us in basecamp”. So, with that, I was getting flown out to spike camp! Ben flew out first and I followed. On my flight, I saw the wreckages of a cub that crashed back in the 80’s where the pilot and passenger passed away (they didn’t make it over a pass in some bad weather), and also saw a group of 4 rams on a mountain that my outfitter said likely were not legal. We were dropped off in a high alpine valley/drainage that evening. We pitched our tents, cooked a mountain house, and glassed two groups of ewe’s/lambs with a total of 16 sheep. Since we got in that evening, we could officially start hunting the next day, a day ahead of schedule. I got to witness one of the most amazing sunsets in Gods country I have ever seen, and slept under the stars with a small tinge of the northern lights. Around 4am, we got some sleet and winds, but the weather didn’t come in like we expected. I struggled to sleep given the anticipation of what the next day held for us, but did get some sleep.
Day 3 (8/31/2023) – Hunting Begins!
In talking with my guide Ben, I learned he had been guiding for 6 years in this area and had guided 9 successful sheep hunts in that time. He had guided in most of the areas of the exclusive use concession my outfitter operated, but the area we were hunting was the only area he had not personally guided. They didn’t run many hunters in the area I would be hunting due to how rugged it was and the physical requirements required to hunt it. My outfitter knew I had been working hard to get in shape, and I was about 20 years younger than the average client, so he wanted me to hunt it knowing there were likely a few good old rams that were never pressured. Ben had always wanted to hunt the area and was excited to tackle it with me. The plan was to hike down the drainage we camped at the head of to about half way down (3 miles or so) and set up camp near water on a flatter spot, then daily we would climb over a pass about 2,750 feet in elevation above our camp to get to a ridgeline, and run that ridgeline to check various major and minor drainages. Seemed reasonable enough until I learned how much loose shale was involved in the ascent to the pass!
We packed up camp with food and water and made our hike down to our new spike camp location. When we got there, we ran into our first problem…..no water. The option was to hike back up to where we were dropped off and load up out 10 Liter water bladders with high alpine lake water, or to hike another 1-1.5 miles down the drainage to where we believed there was running water. We set up camp and knew we had enough water for the day, so we elected to set up camp and hike up to the pass. In doing this, we would glass further down the drainage to see if there was water further down, or if we needed to head back up to the lake. As we were leaving camp, the weather was beautiful. We left the gravel bar and headed up a small drainage towards a ridgeline that would funnel us up to the saddle we were looking to pass over. When we rounded the corner, much to my surprise, was a big healthy Mare. Ben got a big grin on this face and turned to me excitedly. He said he had heard stories about this mare but didn’t know if we would get to see her. She has been living in this valley alone for at least 15 years, having gotten away from a pack string. The previous outfitter saw her their first year in the area, which was 15 years ago, so she is definitely a tough old girl. She looked healthy and while she wouldn’t let us touch her, we got pretty close and she was very docile. It was such a cool experience to see her in that natural state.
Once we got done playing around with her, we restarted our ascent up the mountain. My pack wasn’t that heavy, but the altitude was kicking my butt, the hills were steep, and the shale was moving under my feet every step. I’m not sure how the old times did this without trekking poles, but I do know that I wouldn’t want to do it without them. On our way up we did spot water about a mile further down the drainage from camp, which was much better thana 3-mile hike back up to the lake, so we had our plan for water moving forward. After about 2.5 hours of climbing, we were approaching the saddle. The last 500 yards required walking a sheep trail side hilling a 40-degree rock slope which was a bit unnerving for this flatlander. As we approached the sheep trial, the winds began to pick up, and we were fighting gusts north of 50 MPH. We finally made it to the saddle and started to glass some of the drainages on the backside while we ate a mountain lunch. We were glassing four rams about 3 miles away in another drainage as the winds continued to pick up. Ben and I started to look at each other when the winds were not relenting, and he then decided to check his inreach weather. The results were not favorable……the mountain was calling for sustained winds the next 24 hours at 45-50 MPH, with gusts over 90 MPH. We spent another 30 minutes trying to glass the rams at a distance, but the wind was too much to keep the tripod steady, and we could only tell that two of the rams had good mass and would likely be close, but we didn’t have a definitive answer. The winds were too strong to try and move down the ridgeline to glass other fingers, and we decide to bail off back down to camp.
1.5 hours later and we were back to camp with sore legs and wind-beaten faces. But the work was just beginning! We both had 3-season tents, and unfortunately in the flat spot we had decided to camp was also in the middle of a wind tunnel, with the wind screaming down the valley. Our tents were getting pummeled by 60-70 MPH winds and we both knew this likely wasn’t going to work for the night. We elected to break down camp and pack it further down the valley near water, and try to set up behind a portion of the mountain that might act as a wind break. About 2 hours later and we were re-setup in a more sheltered area and with water. Even with the wind break, it was a long night. I was running a Hilleberg Niak and Ben as running a Big Agnes Copper Spur, and while both tents held up, they were fully bent over more than once. We both tied on additional guide-wires via paracord and tied those off to rocks and Alders, and placed rocks over our stakes. While that did help, the tents barely held up, on numerous occasions the vestibules caved in and the main tents would lay over on us, with the fabric slapping us in the face. Ben guides on the peninsula for Brown bears, and on more than one occasion let out an expletive filled rant along the lines of “that his F******* peninsula hunt for bears wasn’t supposed to start for another month, and this $*** needed to stop.” He emphatically stated this was by far the worst wind he had dealt with in the interior in his years hunting. We didn’t sleep very well that night.
Day 2 (9/1/2023)
We wake up to calmer winds in the valley, but the winds are still there. The forecast calls for winds up on the mountain up to 80 MPH that morning, with the winds subsiding mid-day and getting some calm weather that afternoon. The weather was also calling for snow that night, and we were hopeful that was wrong. But the Garmin weather was far more accurate than the DFW weathermen, so I think I know what I will be checking for weather the rest of my days.
We made a cup of coffee and had a granola breakfast meal to start the day. We planned out the day and decided we were going to go up a saddle further east (down the drainage) today to check 5 different drainages downstream of what we looked at the day before. This would require about 3,000 feet of climbing to get over the saddle, along with running a few ridges that had some dicey country that was very vertical. Ben told me he could get me through it, and he was right. I was gaining some confidence this second day and we were able to successfully navigate it. My lungs were doing better on day 2 and my legs still felt good, but my boots were causing some pain in my Achilles. I decided the only solution was to start popping Motrin and fight thought the discomfort, as well as Leukotape the pain points. This proved to be an effective strategy that would work throughout the course of the trip.
We made it to the top in about 2.5 hours and then spent the next 6 hours glassing drainages. The winds were high, and at points we definitely had gusts over 50 MPH, but they did die down to a more reasonable 20-30 MPH speed that afternoon. We glassed three drainages with no sheep, which surprised both of us, as there was sheep sign everywhere. While we were eating lunch between glassing drainages, we were surprised to see a wolverine pop his head over a rock about 200 yards away and give us a 20-second stare down. Once he realized he couldn’t take us, he scurried away. I wasn’t expecting to get to see a wolverine, so that was a special experience. After that surprise at lunch, we decided to work to the fourth drainage via the backside of a ridge to stay hidden. With it being early afternoon and the sun being out, the thermals were carrying up and the wind was in our face. Out of nowhere, the wind switched 180 degrees and started blowing out over the drainage. We both looked at each other and just stopped, laying down on the backside of the ridge. We waited about 10 minutes for the wind to settle down, then we creeped up and looked into the drainage. Our worst nightmare had come true, we saw three rams about 500 yards out and they were working away from us. We put the glass on them and none of them were legal, but they were blowing out of the country. We watched them for 10 minutes or so as they worked their way towards the last drainage we were headed to check. As they rounded the corner out of site, we caught movement to our left and four more rams that we couldn’t previously see were now also working out of the drainage the opposite direction, back towards the drainages we had already checked. There was a shooter in this group, and I wanted to throw up. He was full curl on his left side and was shorter on this right. He wasn’t a monster, but he was a good legal Ram.
We ended up following this group of rams for the next 3 hours as they worked their way across 3 drainages, untimely entering the country we planned to hunt the next day. We knew we were going to catch up to them, so we were just trying to put them to bed. Once they went into the country that we were going to hunt the next day, we gave up on the dream of putting them to bed, and instead elected to go back down to camp, as there was only about 2 hours of daylight left. We had put on about 8 miles and 5,000 of elevation gain for the day when it was all said and done. My legs were tired, my stomach empty and I was emotionally beat after screwing up on the ram, but I knew we still had 9 days of hunting. I was thankful to be in gods country, and seeing a shooter ram was awesome! We both went to bed very tired and humbled.
Day 3 (9/2/2023)
Did I mention Garmin Weather was accurate?!?!? Well we ended up getting about 4-5” of snow overnight at our camp, and the tops of the mountains got close to 12”, just as the forecast called for. Our saving grace was that the sun was to come out around 9am, and temps were supposed to get up into the mid-40’s, so we were hopeful it would melt off. Given the technical nature of the hiking we had to do, we didn’t feel it was safe to traverse the mountain with deep snow. So we elected to stay in camp for the morning. We made coffee and breakfast and rested our legs. While sitting with Ben between our tents drinking our second cups of coffee I noticed movement over his shoulder. Up on the mountain about 250 yards away was a Sow Grizzly with a single cub. The cub was an older cub (probably 2 years old), and when they noticed us, they turned tail and hauled off the other way. Given what I have read, it was a good sign that hey hauled butt away, which is an indication they wouldn’t be a nuisance the rest of the trip.
The weather was improving, but the sun didn’t come out like we expected, so the whole day ended up being a non-sheep-hunting day as we couldn’t safely navigate the mountain. We elected to hike 2 miles back up the main valley and hike up a hill to glass the valley for bears the rest of the day given I had a grizzly tag. We didn’t turn anything but, but did have lots of good conversations on hunting, life, family, sports, etc. It was a good day to let my legs recuperate as well. In our discussions that afternoon, we had been looking at the maps on the Garmin and had identified an area up on top of the mountain that might allow us to pitch our tents and save us the 2500-3000 daily climb. We both decided it was worth it to try and make that happen, but also knew there was no water up there. So our plan was to pack up spike camp that next morning with all of our food, and for each of us to carry 13- liters of water up the mountain with our gear to get camp set up high, which would allow us 3-days up top without having to drop back down for water. This would require us hiking up with about 85 lbs. on our back. With the shale and knife ridges, I knew this was going to take a lot of my mental and physical strength, so I decided to eat the most calorically dense free-dried dinner I had in an effort to prepare for the next day.
Day 4 (9/3/2023)
We wake up and I make a biscuits and gravy freeze dried breakfast and a cup of coffee. We let the sun come up to burn off the dew from our rain flies, and we load up all our food, water and camp into our packs and hike up the valley about a mile. From there, we start our vertical ascent up the mountain. It takes us 6 hours to get to our destination, but we make it. There were moments on that journey where I questioned my sanity with ice/snow still on loose rock. Man times boulders would roll out from under our feet and careen down hundreds of feet, gaining speed and knocking free other rocks. In my younger days before having a wife and kids I likely wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but having those loved ones at home made more conscious of some of the dumb things we were doing to kill a sheep. I kept telling myself “Curtis, if you are going to be dumb, at least be smart about it”. So I was as smart as I could be while navigating the terrain, taking some things painfully slow to ensure I didn’t make a mistake.
We got camp set up and then worked our way down a ridgeline and gained about 400 feet in elevation. WE set up the spotting scope and began glassing for sheep. With snow still on the mountain, finding white sheep had become more challenging, but within two hours we had found over 40 sheep within 5 miles of us. As we picked through them, we relocated the four rams from the first day and determined that one of them was legal, but the play was 4+ miles away and would require dropping 3K feet and then regaining about 2.5K feet. About 5 miles away there was a group of 5 rams we couldn’t tell much about, and we saw about 20 ewes and rams scattered about. Then we glassed directly below us about 1500 yards, and to our surprise found a group of 10 ewes lambs with a ?-curl ram in there with them. Finding a ram with Ewes is not common for this time of year, so Ben’s BS radar was going off. We spent the next hour watching them, and over time we found that there were three groups of rams around the ewes, and they were moving back and forth between a feeding area, a mineral lick and the only surface water within about a 5 mile radius. One of the groups of rams was the group we busted on day-2 with a shooter, the other was a group of three sub-legal rams, and the last was a pair of two shooter rams, one of them being a stud! We talked about what we could and couldn’t pull off that evening as far as a stalk, but ultimately there ended up being too many sheep eyes around and we decided it was best to return to camp, cook dinner, get our legs back under us and make a play the following day. We put the sheep to bed and then worked our way back to camp.
Day 5 (9/4/2023)
We woke up to high winds on the mountain and high spirits! We knew where the sheep had bedded, so we worked our way to our preferred glassing point to re-evaluate the situation that morning. The sheep had moved a bit, but were all still in the same general area. We found the two big rams along with the ewes and lambs, but couldn’t locate any of the other rams. Not a huge concern as we were focused on the big boys, but we did want to know where they were to make sure our stalk wasn’t busted by them. We watched the big boys for 2 hours while we waited for the thermals to shift up the mountain, as we wanted to approach them at a higher elevation and shoot across a canyon, getting within 400 yards. During this waiting game, I had a little visitor called an Ermin come visit me. Cute littel guy!
After 3 hours, it became apparent the winds weren’t going to cooperate, so we elected for plan B. We were going to leave camp up high and bomb off the backside of the mountain, giving up 3,000 FT of elevation. We would then work our way around two mountain fingers and back up the drainage, using a cutbank and alder for cover until we could reach a foothill that we could parallel, and then form there work up a the foothill about ? a mile to try and get within 400 yards. We left at 10am and made it down to the bottom around noon.
We ate a quick lunch, then continued the stalk. The rams were up on a precipice with a full view of the valley. So while we had the wind advantage, we were below them and they had the visual advantage. For those that haven’t hunted sheep, they have vision equivalent to an 8x binocular and are always looking down the mountain for danger, so its best to try and approach them from above. As discussed before, we gave up the high ground due to the wind as a calculated decision, and we would physically pay for it. We belly crawled at a painstakingly slow pace through alders and rock fields for 400 yards, we crouch walked along cutbanks for another 600 yards, all to get within 750 yards. We were hung up at 750, and getting closer would mean we had to cross a 80 yard opening with no cover completely in their view, which would have ended it all before it got started. As I mentioned, our goal was to cross this opening to get to the foothill for cover, but the timing had to be right. We waited for 1.5 hours for the rams to move off the precipice where they where chewing their cud, and when they did, we sprinted to the foothill and then began our climb. We gained about 250 feet in elevation while we closed from 750 yards to 400 yards. When we popped our head up over the foothill, we could only see one ram. I got prone with my rifle on my bipod and a pack lid under my buttstock and waiting for Ben to tell me which ram it was. Ben then whispered to me “it’s the big SOB and he is at 380 yards, kill him!” I dialed my scope to 375, and as I did so the ram go antsy. He moved back up the mountain about 10 yards and stopped to look, at which point I let the 300 win mag with 200 grain accubonds eat. It was a great shot but was behind the shoulder so it didn’t break him down like a shoulder or spine shot would. He ran up the mountain a few steps, so I racked another round and gave him a Texas heart shot. At this point he fell down the mountain a few yards, but picked his head up again, so I put one more in him behind the shoulder at a hard quarter. And just like that, the mountain monarch was down and I had my dram Dall ram.
4:21 PM AST, and my dream ram was on the ground. I sent in reach messages to my wife and Father, and then Ben and I headed up the mountain to check him out. It took us about 45 minutes to get to him 400 yards away given the terrain, but we made it. I got to put hands on my sheep, and at that moment I could unequivocally say that this ram is the most special animal I have ever hunted. The effort put into preparing to hunt him and the hunt itself to this point, along with the country he was hunted in, makes it unlike anything else I have done. I took about a half hour to reflect on how special this was and how much it meant to me, and then we got to work on him. We ended up rolling him about 200 feet down the mountain and then dragged him to a small area of muskeg that was relatively flat for photos and processing. It rained intermittently during the process, so we had to throw on rain gear, which would be a foreshadowing of what was ahead of us the remainder of the night.
We caped and quartered the ram out and then packed the horns, cape and meat about a half mile back up the mountain to get it away from the carcass. At this point, it was 8pm and we had about 1.5 hours of daylight left. We were a little over 2,000 feet below our camp in elevation with a big hike up through some loose scree and boulder fields. WE thought it would take 2.5-3.5 hours to get back up to camp, and would require headlamps. We were low on water (each had half a liter on us) with most of our water up at camp. WE discussed sleeping under a tarp in our hunting clothes versus making the climb back to camp. The weather was forecasted to drop into the high teens with sleet. I finally looked at Ben and said I would rather be wet, cold and miserable climbing in the dark so that I could have a full bottle of water and a warm sleeping bag than siwashing on the side of the mountain, so we put on our headlamps and started climbing. That 4-hour climb in the dark after a long day of hunting was one of the most mentally challenging things I have ever done. By the time we made it up top, I was out of water, sweating through my clothes, was getting sleeted on and we heavily bruised from quite a few trips/falls in the boulder and shale fields. I was almost delirious when we rolled back into camp in the sleet-storm at midnight. I got in my tent, changed out of my dirty clothes into my only other set of clothes, fired up the jet boil, made a quick dinner and downed 2 liters of water, and went to bed shivering and exhausted. I was borderline hypothermic, but my Wester Mountaineering bag got me warmed back up in pretty quick order.
As I shivered myself to sleep while my feet and legs cramped on me, I think I had the biggest grin on my face. Knowing that I had my sheep, a real cranker of a ram, and had accomplished one of my lifelong hunting dreams was enough to make me smile through any amount of pain and discomfort I was feeling.
Day 6 (9/5/2023)
We woke up to a sleet covered mountain and tents. Ben and I both agree we are sleeping until 9am, and then we will make a plan to get the ram off the mountain. After a cup of coffee and a freeze dried breakfast skillet breakfast, we make our plan.
Our options were twofold:
- Drop down the mountain, grab the ram horns, cape and meat, and haul it back up the mountain to our camp, where we would pack up camp, work back over the top of the mountain to the valley we came in on, drop down to the valley floor and then work 4 miles back up the valley to our landing strip. The outfitters cub would be able to pick up the sheep where he dropped us off at, but then we would have to hike another 3-4miels to another strip where he could actually pick Ben and I up at. Our original drop off strip is not long enough to take off with heavy weight.
- Pack up camp and drop camp down with us to get the sheep, then hike to the moth of the drainage where there is water and camp there for the night. Approximately 3 miles to that camp area. From there, the next day would require 8 miles of side hilling and brush-busting to get to a well-known landing strip where both us and the sheep could be flown off the mountain.
Day 7 (9/6/2023)
One would think that when the animal is killed the hunt is close to over. This day proved that to not be case! I took us 12 hours to make it from our spike camp to the landing strip. We covered 8 miles straight line distance, which was probably between 11-12 miles with elevation. We fought a mix of alders, spongy muskeg, shale, tussocks, streams crossing and anything else Alaska could throw at us, all while fighting with a 120-lb pack, and rifle and sheep horns. Our outfitter flew his cub into the landing strip to grab us with about an hour of light remaining and we took a 20 minute flight back to base camp. I got a hot shower than night, a big dinner made from moose, and got to sleep on a cot. I was in heaven!
This was the single most physically challenging day of my life, and I am happy to say I persevered, but likely not without some long-term damage. As I write this, I still don’t have feeling in my big toes due to nerve compression in my feet, and I am going to get an MRI to verify if I have a stress fracture in the talus bone of my left foot.
That said, would I do it again? Hell yes! I learned through this day and the previous days my body is capable of so much more than my mind thinks it is. Mental toughness allows us to reach our full physical potential, and my body persevered through some of the toughest crap I could imagine. My guide Ben said that while the hunt didn’t go 10 days, this was the most effort he had ever put into a sheep between the amount of climbing we did, the ruggedness of the country we attacked, and the pack out we performed.
Day 8 (9/7/2023)
We hang around camp and flesh my Ram’s cape and skull. We see that weather is coming in the next few days at base camp, so I elect to fly out that evening back to town rather than try to hunt a bear, as my wife has been holding down the fort with two young kids while I am away, and I know she can use the help at home. I say my goodbyes and my outfitter flies me back to town. On the flight I see 7 great moose and know if I ever choose to go hunt moose, he would be an outfitter to consider. I get into town and get a hotel and rearrange my flights home a few day early. I grab a pizza and get to watch a football game from the hotel room.
Day 9 (9/8/2023)
I make it back to Fairbanks mid-day, then get on the red-eyes from Fairbanks to Seattle to DFW. Make it home the next morning early enough to surprise the kids on Saturday with breakfast and cartoon time. To say I am a lucky man would be an understatement.
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