Two of a Kind, Northern BC Sheep Hunt
June 22, 2020 - The world has been in turmoil for the last 3 months due to Covid 19. The majority of the population has been restricted to staying either at home for months on end or staying away from those they normally spend time with. For those that like to spend time in the great outdoors we can’t help but look forward to times when we can travel out or around our province unhindered by the social distancing/pandemic lifestyle. For now I think back over the last few years hunts I’ve had a chance to experience and relive the stories in my mind. I have been most fortunate to enjoy many days in the wilderness and spend that time with the people that mean the most to me as well as the opportunity to harvest a few great animals along the way. So for now I will have to be happy with recounting my Northern BC Stone sheep hunt of 2019.
August 2019 found myself planning yet another wild getaway into the North. This year I planned on hunting with my cousin, Kinley as we are both young and eager to hike further then most and willing to do things some may find just too uncomfortable. As we prepped our equipment over July and August we couldn’t help but notice that BC was hammering the August sheep hunting crowd with winter-like storms and bad weather. We were nervous about what September would be like as we did not plan to leave until Sept 10. Fortunately, the weather smartened up and the highways were good on our departure from FSJ up the highway and into the mountains.
Fast forward 1 long travel day had us hanging our extra gear high in a tree and taking off with our spike camp for the next few days to see if we could locate some sheep. We seemed to have timed the elk rut just perfectly as there were bulls bugling all around us at almost all times of the day. We journeyed a full day up to our target mountain and began glassing. It took only a few minutes to discover a band or rams feeding on a grassy hillside a few kms from our spotting location. With one look of the spotting scope we knew that they were good rams but at that distance we were unable to age anything. The only downside to this was that the sheep were over 1.5-2 mountain ranges away from us and we would need to weasel our way over to them somehow. But on the brightside, we had rams spotted on day 2 and the rest of the trip to see if we could get close. We decided to take the day and get as close to the rams as we could from the mountain we were on, so a few hours hike later found us a km closer to the sheep with a much better spotting angle. We took some pictures and tried to age some rams but it was still difficult due to the extended range. We had packed food for about 5 days and still had another 15 days of food back at base camp so the plan was to hike back to base, pick up at least 7 full days of food and start the trek over to the rams. We thought about going down the far side of the mountain and trying to take a short cut to the rams but we would have to walk through kms of a terribly nasty burn and ford a small river to get there, as opposed to taking an ‘easier’ route that would just be longer. The next day we packed up our camp and headed back to base to get everything we needed for the long haul. On the return trip we saw a few good 6 point bull elk one of which we bumped several times moving down the mountain. Nothing tests your will solely to sheep hunt like seeing a 320” bull Elk standing broadside at 150 yards for minutes on end, screaming as you sit in the grass eating your trail mix at lunchtime. The plan was to hunt sheep for the first week to 10 days and then try to get an elk. So if this fella was still around later he may be in trouble.
Stone Rams
Big 6 point Bull Elk
That evening we had traveled the many kms with our full packs to the base of the mountains that the rams were on. It was getting dark so we set up camp and listened to the elk bugle all night long. We even had a small 6 point come right into our camp and continue to bark at us for about an hour. It rained that night and by morning continued to mist so our last pull up the drainage on the ram mountains was a wet one. However, once we reached the top the sun came out around lunchtime just as we were setting up our spotting scopes and again within minutes we located the band of rams. We believed these to be the same rams and from a much closer distance there were 2 that looked really good. We set up a small camp in a patch of timber but took our sleeping bags and some food as we were going to try and make a play on the rams tonight, or at least try and get proper age on them. A few hours later and we set up a small siltarp with our sleeping bags underneath as we knew we would not be making it back to the tent tonight. Just behind the tarp we had a good vantage to see the rams from about 900-1100 yards, the closest we've been to them yet. We saw one large, low slung and tipped out ram who we thought was in the 7-8 age range and the other one was a tighter curl, super heavy ram with one horn broomed and one tip still intact. We watched them feed as the sun went down then made our way back to the tarp for the night.
Siltarp Tenting
Stone Rams speckled on the hillside
We thought the broomed ram looked to be older than the tipped ram and as both myself and Kinley have taken rams we were looking for something either fairly special or fairly old. However we came this far and those rams still needed to be aged up close and without wind vibrating our scopes so the next morning we hiked up the ridge to get above the sheep. An uneventful hike had us sitting on top of the mountain looking at the weather rolling in from the south. Black clouds as far as you could see, and then the rain started... We set up the tarp and decided to wait it out. After watching a small banana ram feed by our tarp at 10 yards without giving us a second thought the rain seemed to get heavier and heavier without any inclination it was going to stop. We decided the best thing to do was to go back down the mountain to our tent to try and keep dry and warm. When we got back to our tent the rain was thundering down and we set up the tarp under a few big trees just to keep the rain off of us as we put up the tent. Now I consider myself to be a fairly competent outdoorsman as well as my cousin. We have both been raised doing this type of thing and over the years we have all heard stories of people dying in the cold because they could not start a fire. “That would never happen to me” I have thought in the past, or “with a good lighter you should be able to get some kind of fire going”.... FALSE! The last few hours of pouring rain had saturated everything in the small mostly alpine basin we were camped in so bad that even with a plethora of good fire starter, nothing would light and we found ourselves getting more and more soaked. We decided to put our things under the tarp and crawl into our sleeping bags like the wet rats we felt like. It was only about 6 pm but felt later as it was so dark and stormy, so with nothing left to do we went to sleep.
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