Richard's Hunting Trip

This is the sheep hunting trip that my friend Adam and I went on in August 2007. As he was coming from Fairbanks and I from Eagle River, we met not too far from here on our way to the lodge we were staying at for the night. We saw this sign along the way and decided to stop for a picture. This is where Adam and I first entered GMU 12, where we would be hunting for the week.

Here I am on our first day of hunting. Adam and I were hiking up this creek, making numerous crossings, when we finally got to this little canyon. So we had to hike up the hill on the right to continue up the valley. On my pack is all of my gear for the week. The total weight was about 70 pounds including my rifle! Yeah, 70 lbs, almost 1/2 my body weight.




















This is the following day of hunting. We woke up to find a perfect weather day. We were packing light and mainly out seeing what we could see. This ended up being a really long and demanding day of hiking.



















Here are some examples of the cool rock formations we ran into. There were quite a few really cool looking rocks that we considered bringing back until we thought about the additional weight.


















I thought this one was kinda cool. It was a huge rock, but it had lots of little rocks stuck in it.





Here is Adam making a stream crossing. We crossed these mountain streams hundreds of times.



































This is about where we first spotted rams from. Our camp is below us and behind the camera about 2 miles.




















Above is my favorite picture from the trip. Behind me across the valley is where we first spotted a band of rams from. We were trying to sneak up behind them on this little hike. Unfortunately, we were a little off on our view of the mountain and there were two ridges.



















This is a little further up the same mountain. What a long day!


















Here we are at the top. As tired as I was, Adam looked even more beat. This is about 6600 feet high. Good thing we brought snacks and found water way up high. Adam is digging into a powerbar here.




















One more creek crossing. I think this is the day after our really long hike.

















This is a sheep that we saw across the valley. He wasn't legal, but we had some fun watching him for a while. This is a picture taken through my Zeiss 85mm spotting scope.










































Ok, time for a little break. We took turns on the spotting scope. We only brought one to save on weight. I wish we had saved a little more! We were just a little below the crest of a hill looking at a large group of rams. We couldn't see any way to get closer without being seen, so we decided to watch them for as long as we could to see what they were up to.








Here are two of the guys we were watching. They were on a hill one over from us that was long, high, wide, steep, etc. They could see everything in all directions from their little perch. When we first saw these guys, they were a group of four. One was looking around while the others were sleeping. One had his face almost upside down, another had one horn augered into the slope and the other one was sleeping in a fairly traditional fashion. Eventually another group of five joined up with them and they spend most of the day together.

We watched these guys for the entire day and ended up walking back in the dark. In the end, we decided that none of them were legal. There was one guy that was close, but we figured it wasn't worth the effort. We could only see one way to get close enough to age him (count the growth rings on his horns) and that was to spend the night very close to where they were hanging out and be right on top of them in the morning.






Along the way we found some snow that hadn't melted yet!





This is our last day in the field. We loaded up the trailer with all of our stuff and rode out to the lodge.





We took a little time on the way out to look for moose. The season was open for a few days, and we figured it was worth a little time to look around. The temperature was pretty high, and we didn't see any moose moving around.






This is generally the area we were hunting in from a distance. We were on the other side of this mountain.




Ahhh a nice cold beer!






Even though we didn't get a sheep, we had a great time!