Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game 2016 Bighorn in WY

Way cool!

This is just too Cool for School!

Congrats on the Ram of a lifetime!

That Ram is a stud of a specimen, Outstanding.

A hunt of that type in that locale is what dreams are made of.

I have no issue saying I'm quite jealous.

Congrats, a real nice sheep! As earlier stated,a once in a lifetime! Unless, your quite wealthy! memtb

Awesome job and beautiful ram.

Gents, thanks for the replies. I hope it encourages other guys to go.

I read Silver Bullet’s post about his cousin’s DIY with interest. To me, a DIY hunt is all hunting from the ground up. This hunt magnified that point--am thinking guys who pull off a DIY sheep, have enjoyed (or suffered) the best kind of sheep hunt. You got to get there with all your gear, granted, but the two larger hurdles are finding shootable rams and then successfully getting up on them after finding them. Doing it well is a product of cumulative experience. To my way of thinking that is the hunting part and shooting them is the ending capstone to enjoying all the work and adrenalin. Laughing at the stories they told, you become aware that guide is under pressure the whole time--can his hunter handle the daily climbs and then shoot well enough under pressure to kill the critter? It’s not just an unfilled tag to him or all the folks making base camp work, it’s livelihood.

Like most guys, I have more deer hours in the woods than anything else. And a lot of those are in prep and scouting. Sometimes a good buck just falls in your lap and that’s hunting. Always happy for that…never throw one back… Am seldom to never forthcoming on how many years it took me to really understand deer movement in a new spot in the big woods or on a big farm for that matter. It takes a lot of time and effort, for me at least.

Scouting before the hunt to know there are sheep in the country requires time and effort. Then, being in good ram country, being able to glass and find them. Dustin asked me what I expected roughly size-wise and I replied that 160-165” was good with me. He said that the 165” figure was what they had in mind as well. We glassed some sheep we couldn’t get to and we glassed some sheep I really didn’t want to get to…:) Seeing sheep is one thing… Jack O’Connor wrote something about that regarding sheep – an outsider has to have a lot of time and money to go it alone. Time and money is an issue here... Having gear, getting gear into the back country and staying there long enough to score is a big deal—more than I could bite off.

The best thing to do if you are going be a sheep hunter is to live there, imho. That was the plan at 21, but events altered my scheme. So you build preference points. Twenty years or so, and everyone tells you that you will have more money then, too…:) What I didn’t factor in were injuries—self-inflicted risk taking types—mostly stupid, two auto wrecks, job mishaps—they all added up. By the time a guy is 60, hobbling around is pretty average.

So then, gentlemen, my hat is off to DIY sheep hunters and sheep guides. For me, guided was the way to go. If you are thinking Wyoming keep Dustin Stetter in mind.


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+1. "Remind me to never pick a fight with a sheep guide."

There is nothing like walking up to a Bighorn Sheep and getting your hands around those horns.