Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Backpack Hunting (DIY) Sheep hunts of North america

Nashville;
Good afternoon my friend, it's been too long since I've said hello to you. I hope you've been keeping well enough despite all the strange days we're having up here.

Since I've told most of this before, I'll apologize in advance and try to either add some new stuff or at least make it interesting.

In the late '80's we had over the counter tags for California Bighorn here in the semi-famous Vaseux Lake herd. From that herd sheep were transplanted into Oregon, Nevada, Washington state for sure and other spots here in BC. The restrictions were 3/4 curl minimum and then we were allowed one ram every three years at first, then it switched to one every five and now it's LEH with only two tags.

At first I wasn't really interested in chasing sheep, but as I became more and more involved with the local gun/fish and game club I sort of caught the fever. Full disclosure here too for all, this is a backpack hunt but not really in that we're hunting out of a 4x4 driving to the end of logging roads and then day hiking in from there.

Some of the area we're looking at would look like this.



This


That


Or even this


As a by the way Nashville, we moved from Oliver which is south of the 3rd photo to where we're at today just north of Vaseux Lake which is the one in the bottom photo. Our place is a couple kilometers north of the lake up on a bench about the same elevation as the hayfield in that picture.

The first year I got serious enough to book a week off of work and hit it hard was 1990 and while I saw rams that year, I wasn't able to make it come together. The next year that is '91, I again booked off a week and headed into some areas where I had less competition and knew some rams usually were. It is quite rough country, much like the top photo and I was in the timber just at daybreak when this guy was staring at me from about 80yds in the timber. When he turned to run I saw he was 3/4 curl and I sent a bullet from my BBR '06 into his lungs.

Orville Dyer, one of the bios in Penticton aged it at 7 and one can see that the herd wasn't in great shape as it's not huge growth for a 7 year old. To be clear I was very happy with it then and am today.



Funny side story here Nashville, I wrote the story up in the old Western Sportsman magazine and didn't hear anything from them for years, so assumed it didn't make the cut. Then out of the blue in '96 a buddy calls me and starts telling me how much he liked the story about my sheep hunt??? What???

They hadn't sent anything my way and when I called them, they sounded confused but did send a cheque for it after awhile which paid for a good 10" Makita miter saw I badly needed at the time.

So in true Paul Harvey tradition Nashville, this past fall my long time hunting partner and good friend got drawn for one of the two tags up behind the house.

We started in the last week of August when it was still 32°C up top spotting and hit it hard when season opened on September 01st. While we saw rams and it was so cool to be the only ones up there hunting since it was only bow season for deer and elk then, we just couldn't put it together and then after a couple weeks the rams vanished.

One afternoon sitting in our yard before we headed up for another kick at it, I suggested we go look at the old haunts where I'd hunted all those years before. Sure enough right near dark I spotted two rams and then he and his nephew picked up a couple more near the first two. We put them to bed and were up on the hill in the dark the next morning.

So it was that 31 years and 2 days after I'd shot my ram, buddy took a wonderful ram within half a kilometer of where mine died. His ram has better bases, carries more weight out the curl and is longer than mine and was aged at 5 which is partially from the big fire we had up there in '03 which really improved the feed.

While I do have photos of it, he's not into social media and I respect that. He was very generous with the meat however, so here's some of it when we were cutting it up in our garage.



Again not a backpack hunt for sure, but mine was a solo run. His had a few of us old sheep hunters gathered together for what we all figured might be our last ram hunt up there, since the odds of being drawn before we cross over aren't great, you know?

Thanks for reading and for letting my mind wander down some grand vistas and epic adventures.

All the best to you in 2023.

Dwayne