Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Idaho sheep hunt 27-1

My good friend drew a sheep tag for 27-1!! It's a nasty area, all wilderness, but he is a hiking fool and is getting pretty excited already. Has anyone ever hunted sheep there before? If someone has a few pointers for the area that would be great.

As i'm sure you know, its a very tuff hunt with few sheep, not unlike Montana's unlimited units.

sorry, i havent been in that area. good luck with it, they dont kill sheep very consistently there so if he gets one, he can sure be proud of it!

Ross 220, check your P.M.

L.W.

Where is 27-1 ?
I hunted on the east side of the Middle Fork of the Salmon downriver from Flying B (I believe it was) to the confluence of the main Salmon.

27-1 is on the west side of the middle fork. That must have been a pretty tough hunt Rolly. Were you hunting sheep in there?

My friends cousin also drew a tag in 27-1 with him so they will be able to hunt together. I hope I can get in there with them a few times, because my friend was a lot of help when I had my sheep tag a few years ago.

I don't have the sheep regs, but it's in unit 27. Sometimes they'll split a unit or maybe have a later hunt in the same unit so there might also be a 27-2 for a different part of 27 or maybe at a different time.

It was one of the roughest hunts I have been on with the exception of a recent mt. goat hunt. The country was very steep, no water once you leave the middle fork, hot (even in October), and had burned a few years earlier so everything you touched got you black with soot.

We flew into Flying B, floated for a week on an unguided hunt. We hunted on foot as much as we could by climbing out of the canyon. Believe it or not, climbing out was not possible in many of the drainages. The drainages were so steep at their entrance to the river that rocks were falling occasionally and we had to back out or risk being injured.

We saw 37 lambs and yews(sp ??) and not a single ram. We had been running 2 miles a day and working out with weights in prep and I was 38 years old. My buddy who also had a license was about 45. We suspected the rams were up high. The limiting thing that kept us below the rams was the lack of water. When you have to carry water, at 8 lbs a gallon, and you need a lot of it when it's hot and you're going uphill, you don't go uphill very far. But, we went up as high as we could as often as we could but we both got skunked. Sadly, we were never able to go up more than half the mountain. That took us about 5-6 hours of steady climbing.

To give you an idea of how steep it was...When I got home, I looked at my photo's. We noticed this brown blob down in the bottom of one of the pictures. The country was so steep I had photographed my own toe without realizing it!

Make no mistake, there are rams but it is tough country on the east side of the river. Hopefully, the west side will be easier for you. Interestingly, many floaters see rams down near the water. We didn't.

I'm not exactly sure which of the 27 subunits we were in, but I helped my pard get a ram last year in there. Be forewarned, it's a tough hunt (the rame was shot on the 32nd day hunting for it). IMO, mentally more so than physically. You spend a LOT of time looking and not seeing a whole lot of game.

There's an outfitter that guides for sheep in that unit. He was less than friendly with us, but knew where the sheep were. If you're in the same area as him you did your homework. A couple of his guides/wranglers were very helpful with info.