In 2006 my brother and I bought and sold some property, he put a heat pump in his house, I booked a dall sheep hunt.
2007 finds me in Alaska, We use rangers to get to the motozied boundry and I meet my guide. Nice young man, He used the gi bill and went to guide school and he worked as a packer for the outfitter the year before. This year he is a full blown guide taking his very first client sheep hunting. Actually very first client he takes hunting. That's me. We get to talking and I discover that I have spent more time in the mountains of Alaska, than my guide has. (I should have sheep hunted when I was a resident.) No big deal, I am in the mountains and I know what I can do. So the next day the guide cuts his hand on his knife and does not have a first aid kit. We use mine. No biggie. A couple of days later I spot some sheep and they just are not legal. So we continue on to the next camping spot for the night. I can see that we are running low on food, I ask the guide how many days he packed for and the guide tells me that he told the packer,(who has never been to Alaska before) to pack the food for the 6 day backpack hunt. The guide did not check the food or anything. Needless to say we ran out of food. But the day we ran out of food, we found legal rams. So I made an executive decision to send the guide back to some cabin a half days hike away for more food, and me and the packer will meet him the next day where these 2 creeks come together. He is not game for it at first, but eventually gives in. I wasn't leaving due to we found what we came here for. And it was not the first time I was in the mountains of Alaska with out food. You should have seen the look on the packers face when I got back to camp with out the guide. The packer was in such bad shape that we had to leave him in camp, he had never worn a full blown backpack before. I had a decent size bag of trail mix, that the packer and I shared for dinner that night. The next day at noon we met the guide and I drank coffee and ate food. We then went out and slayed a nice dall ram. We got back to camp that night at midnight. The next day we walked to the cabin and celebrated. God did we eat that night in the cabin. Someone had left a 24 pack of budlight also. Yea haw on that, sheep chunks on a fire, chased by beer. My ram ended up being 36 inch curl, just a nice respectable representivive of the species. Oh I forgot to say that this was supposed to be a horse hunt and I did not bring a full blown backpack, just a good day pack. Well I did learn you can do a 6 day backpack hunt with a daypack. To me, there was a lot of stuff that was weird about this hunt but it was successful. And it turned into a good story.
guide with his finger bandaged up
dall sheep
day pack stuffed to the gills
next time I will tell you about the dall sheep hunt where the outfitter and guides never showed up and I flew in and flew out 6 days later with out ever meeting the guide or outfitter. That was a real shitty expierence.
