Hunt of a Lifetime : Desert Bighorn Sheep Dream Hunt – Part 1

Evening glassing and a beautiful desert sky.

The Setup

There is something about the Mojave Desert that is just so enchanting to me. With its stark and colorful mountains, bared naked by the elements to flaunt their geologic conception, and the deceptively steep and gravelly pediments leading to greasewood valley floors, this desert is just beautiful to me. My first real immersion came only last year, when my lifelong friend invited my wife, dad, and I to join him on a desert bighorn sheep hunt. I could write endlessly on that experience and this desert, but now my wife’s 2017 desert bighorn sheep tag held my focus.

Having taken a few days to perform some quick road and land reconnaissance, the summer drifted along without our investing any further time in scouting. My wife, dad, and I trundled into “sheep school” one early August Saturday morning, full coffee tumblers a small lifeline against endless biology slideshows. We still really didn’t know what we were getting in to….My wife had a desert bighorn sheep tag in Nevada! I’m not sure that ever sunk in until the hunt was over.

Preparation

Now, while my biologist and game warden friends may not have been on par with TED speakers, they did have passion. I could see that each of them really wanted to be there. Their enthusiasm inspired, and their advice set my brain back to work. Most of all, this one little 4-hour block of my life inspired me to get back out and scout, with a better focus on field-judging these animals.

A couple of weeks later, my wife and I threw our camping gear in the truck along with all kinds of glass and tripods. This time, we would stay three days, sleeping out in the desert for two nights. For sure, we would find three or four big rams that my wife would be happy to claim as her own. She did, after all, have a bighorn sheep tag in one of the two or three most coveted areas in Nevada, in my mind, the equivalent of hitting the lotto.

Fast forward three days and two nights, and my wife and I were feeling the beginnings of a nagging concern. We had not found three or four bighorn sheep with which she’d be happy. We were also surprised by the overall lack of rams in general. What we did encounter were a lot of wild burros, their hee-hawing calls seeming to mock us. As an aside, I’ve got to say, every time we got to hear these goofy critters hollering at each other, we simply could not suppress a smile or even the odd LOL moment. They are hell on the environment, but they are definitely entertaining.

Well, we were now very acquainted with the area, its roads and canyons. We knew where the water holes were and where the human activity was most and least. It wasn’t a big area, so it was relatively easy to get a good look into most faces of most canyons (not all, mind you); however, we really were growing concerned.

Decisions

Bighorn sheep mysteriously die off. There are many theories, and one that is increasingly stepping out front is the introduction of a nasty little pneumonia-like bug from domestic livestock to wild sheep. There are a lot more things we don’t know about this disease than we do know, but it can be devastating to sheep herds. I had wondered why the tag allocation had dropped in the area in 2017, and now I was starting to worry.

It turns out, the sheep in that area have been impacted by the infection. Combined with our September lackluster scouting, we were becoming a bit nervous. On the one hand, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. On the other hand, we had no idea how bad the situation might be. To top it off, a near-season phone call to the biologist wasn’t encouraging. A special hunt had been guided in our area before the normal season opened. That person hunted 10 days and didn’t get the ram he’d hoped for. Hmm….

In Nevada, we run a bonus-point system, and my wife had accumulated 11 points. Her odds of drawing this tag, according to the folks at GoHunt, were about 0.5%. Translation: if she passed on this opportunity, it might be 10 or more years to get it again. So what do we do? If we turn the tag back in, she keeps her 11 points to try again another day; however, 0.5%…. It is a testament to both my overthinking of a matter and my lack of clear understanding that I started coaching my wife to consider turning it back in. What a dope! To her everlasting credit, she flatly refused my suggestion. She knew it might be tough, but she reasoned that she had no guarantees to ever get another sheep tag. She just wasn’t willing to give up the bird in the hand…God bless her!

Decisive: No Looking Back

We set plans. We would reunite the previous season’s bighorn sheep hunting team, a rather weak total of 5 sheep hunting seasons between the four of us! Don’t mess with a good thing. Also, there is something to be said for loyalty and friendship all the way around. We were after adventure and good times with people we love. We were very lucky to have my dad and friend Ken join and support us.

I’d shared my die-off worries with a young friend of mine who is addicted to sheep hunting. He put out feelers and got some feedback from a helicopter pilot. The guy emphatically said “Don’t let your friend turn in that sheep tag!” He went on to say they’d seen over 150 rams in their five or six day hunt in the same area in 2016. Now that was encouraging! What was also encouraging was my wife’s true hunter attitude. We would go and hunt. We would do our best. We’d have a good time. We’d enjoy the outcome, no matter what.

Lone ram in a secluded hideout

All of the experts seem to tell you to spend some days scouting immediately before starting your hunt. We did not have that luxury. Instead, we took the additional expert advice of not rushing it and being prepared to hunt 20 days if needed. I even went so far as to worry about ending the hunt too soon and not getting enough bighorn sheep hunting “experience” out of the deal. This put my wife into a more patient frame of mind.

The First Day

As luck would have it, we were able to stay in a nearby town that had motels and some places to eat. This turned out to be worth the extra money involved, as we could focus on hunting instead of “gathering” each day. No worries about meal preparation. No worries about weather (which was fine by the way). Gas, ice, food, beer, water, and sleep all became more of an afterthought than a worry.

Watching a big ram find his bed.

Our one day of scouting before the opening day was damned encouraging. We saw a few rams short of 30 in just five hours of scouting. Nothing that made my wife’s trigger finger itchy, but a darned sight better than our last time out! As we were discussing our good fortune over our evening meal, some friends of ours wandered in. We learned quickly they were with a team of 17 “helpers” working to get a “dream-tag” hunter a big ram.

This news put me into a foul mood, given that the dream tag hunter could roam the state and pick any area. For them to bring a huge crew, with ATV’s, trucks, and God knows what else along with them in an area where only six tags were given was not received by me as good news. This is how public lands hunting works, though. What sets you apart as a hunter is your ability to out-think hunters, not the game animals.

We hatched a plan that evening to go to one of the canyons that was a bit farther from the more popular locations in the mountain range. I figured that maybe we could get away from the herd of folks that were accompanying Mr. Dream Tag. Boy, was I wrong about that…. (Part II here).