royalTOOTH15
Member
- Messages
- 10
Was one of the really lucky ones to draw a Desert sheep tag this past year. Hunted the Hatchet mountains the last week of October. Mozey came down to help me out in addition to a few others. I've moved to Alaska since drawing the tag, so had to travel back down for the hunt.
We hunted the little hatchets the first day and only saw about 20 sheep with a couple small rams. 2nd day we hunted the north side of the big hatchets. Within an hour of light we glassed up a large herd of 40 or more. They were a couple miles away, but we could tell there was a ram that needed a closer look. Hiked in on them and found quite a few sheep around, including several younger rams. Had a cool experience where we ran into a herd of about a dozen with a couple younger rams. We didn't see them until we were about 50 yards away from them and they hadn't seen us. They ended up walking out within less than 10 yards of us.
When we got back to the truck, we took a little break in the shade and started glassing again. Sure enough, back towards where we came from that morning, there's a few sheep on the side hill with a more mature looking ram. We hiked the mile and a half back out there to get a close look. When we got within about 800 yards, I knew I was gonna take a shot if a good one presented. Was able to get within about 415 yards before they started moving up the mountain. I knew it was "now or never." Took the shot and he collapsed and rolled into a ravine.
Got back to the trucks a couple hours after dark, which made us a bit nervous as we had seen plenty of activity of illegal aliens including one guy blazing through the desert dressed in all black. Hoodie, face shield, backpack, all black. It just so happened as we saw him, a border patrol truck was passing by and this guy hit the dirt. (He was maybe 150 yards from us when we saw him). He must have crawled out of there because we never saw him again.
Game and fish ended up scoring my ram in the low 160s. Score wasn't a big deal to me, but I did want an older ram, which is what I got. I'm extatic with the result!
