My Alaskan Adventure
By Rick Leach
As the brown and gold SuperCub lifts off the ground, my excitement swells! We soar through the Alaskan sky toward the hunting camp in the Talkeetna Mountains.
My guide, Jeremy, is there waiting for me. After a delicious dinner of rib-eye steak and fried potatos, Jeremy decides to take advantage of the late setting sun. We have light for an evening scout until 11:30 pm.
Bright and early the next morning we’re up for oatmeal and coffee. The Talkeetna Mountains are lightly dusted with snow as we make our way out of camp to a high peak.
The sheep like to eat at the bottom of the ravine early in the morning before returning to the safety of the rocks.
As we climb the first mountain we spot our first ram. Jeremy takes out his tripod and Ziess spotting scope to get a better look at him. He is alone, a small ram with only a half curl. He’s got a long way to go before he’s legal so we move on.
Two hours and a lot of climbing later, we spot six rams at the bottom of the mountain, feeding their way to the rocky cliffs. Two of the rams are close, but not close enough, or big enough. We’re looking for a monster ram!
Jeremy spots six more rams bedded down in the rocks. One of these is a nice big guy. But he’s so far away. We decide he’s safe where he is and head back to camp, encouraged and hungry. We’ve seen 50 sheep today!
Picking our way through the rocks back to camp it begins to rain - hard! Warm and dry in our tent we gorge ourselves on Toman’s Fat Bastard Burgers and baked beans. It’s pouring too hard to go out again tonight.
I am awakened at 4:30 am to an unfamiliar sound. Something heavy and wet is sliding over the tent. “Go back to sleep!” Jeremy grunts. “There’s six inches of snow outside!”
Hunting sheep is hard enough. Now we’re supposed to hunt white sheep in white snow! Fortunately when we get up at 9:00 am the rain has come and washed away the snow.
We head back to the place where we saw the good ram yesterday, but no sheep! As we climb back up the hill for “Plan B,” suddenly we spot a huge ram staring right at us from 1000 yards away. We freeze. He drops into a ravine and we wait.
He’s not coming out! So we sneak up the next ravine where he won’t see us. After a steep, quiet climb we’re above him, or where he was. He’s gone! He snuck out on us.
The hill above us is almost a 90° incline on pea gravel. Jeremy takes one look at it and says “Are you up to it? It’s nasty!” “I’ll go wherever you go!” I reply.With a sheepish grim Jeremy says, “Just don’t look down!”
Somehow we reached the top, but there’s no sign of our ram. We walk out the ridge and head down to glass around the other side. Suddenly we see eight ewe and lambs right in front of us. We duck down into some rocks to conceal ourselves. I start to creep forward to get a closer look but Jeremy’s hand on my shoulder stops me in my tracks. Three rams have just come up over the peak and are starting to feed. “Don’t move!” Jeremy whispers as he puts the spotting scope on them. We are in plain sight, but they don’t see us! The ram to the left is huge. “Chamber a round,” Jeremy hisses, “but don’t move!”
I’m not sure how you do that, but somehow I do. For an hour we sit, frozen, in plain sight as the rams move closer to us. They are about 400 yards away when a heavy fog rolls in and conceals the sheep from our sight and vice versa.
Now’s our chance to move in closer. Nearly falling over, we rise and creep forward. I have been sitting on my foot for over an hour and there’s no feeling left in my now purple foot! Within five minutes the fog lifts and, hovering like ghosts in the mist, are the outlines of three rams. The largest one is about 265 yards from me.
Through the pounding in my ears I hear Jeremy say, “When you feel confident – take him!”
The ram looks right at me, as if he knows what’s about to happen. I am dead on as the crack of my rifle shatters the silence. The rams jumps us and swaps ends as the other two sheep bolt up the hill. I’ve already rechambered as he goes down, tumbling forward to his final resting place in the rocks.
He’s beautiful – a full curl, 9 rings, 37-3/4" by 37-1/4" with 15" bases. A once in a lifetime Alaskan Dall Sheep, he’ll make the Boone & Crockett record book with a score of 162 2/8. What an awesome experience!