Annual blog hijack to post dead sheep pictures

This year I flew in to the Brooks Range with Jeremy Bauer.  Here we are at the landing strip just getting ready to head out on the first day, notice how bright, shiny and new we look. 

This one is for Melissa who says I always close my eyes in pictures, guess she's right.  This is the second morning still on our way up the valley.

Caught some sun rays breaking through the clouds and thought it was a cool picture.

This is where we made our main camp way up in the headwaters by these caribou bones.  It took two days of hiking to get here.  

This is on our way further up in to the headwaters looking for rams, the valley narrows into a canyon with cool, ancient looking rock walls. 

This is a victory shot way up on the mountain side after we downed Jeremy's ram on the third day. 

Jeremy with his ram.  We nicknamed him the brahma bull as he was double broomed and had really wide flaring horns. 

side view of the same ram

Unfortunately many of the subsequent days turned out like this with dense fog and rain.  hard to hunt for mountain critters in weather like this.....

On the sixth day of our hunt I found a monster ram in the back of one of the headwater drainages.  I made my way through the canyon and was heading up the mountain where I thought he was bedded down when dense fog rolled in again.   Shortly after this picture pounding rain, lighting and thunder forced me down and back to camp.  It was a great night. 

Dead ram I found while looking for the big guy the next day.  I actually saw alot of this, ram skulls with old horns strewn about the valley floors.  In all of the years I've been sheep hunting I've never even found an old sheep horn and on this trip I saw 4-5 sets at least. 

I finally got my ram on the 8th day of our hunt as we were packing our gear and Jeremy's ram back to the landing strip.  If you want the full details call me, actually if you are interested in this chances are we've already talked.

If I was more talented with photo editing like my wife I would crop this, but zoomed out you can get a sense of the slope he was killed on.  Field dressing was super difficult as the low brush hides holes and large rocks which made footing difficult, and the ram was always trying to roll on us.  Unfortunately, after all the work and effort to harvest prime sheep meat--a grizzly ended up eating every last bit of it.  Because there weren't even twigs to make a fire with at our previous camp, neither of us got to eat any of the sheep. 

This one is for Brady Firth who surprised me with this knife on my birthday this year.  I told him it would have ram blood on it by the end of the year!  Thanks again Brady, it worked great. 

This is a picture outside our tent on day 12.  We were supposed to be picked up on day 11, however we got buried by this storm and snowed in for 2 and a half days.  We were running low on food and getting really tired of sitting in our sleeping bags by the time things cleared up enough for the plane to make it in.  Jeremy's wife was getting ready to send in the choppers I think. 

So the night before we were picked up I woke up suddenly hearing footsteps in the snow outside our tent.  I was listening for more when Jeremy sat bolt upright and said, "something just sniffed my head!"  He grabbed his gun and we listened as footsteps crunched the snow around our tent.  Eventually I yelled at what I thought was a bear and we heard it move off.  In the morning this is what I found all around in the snow 3 feet from out tent and Jeremy's head.

Here's Jeremy inspecting his backpack covered in bear hair and chewed on shoulder pads.  I'm not sure why he left mine basically alone as it smelled horribly like dead sheep.   Overall it was an awesome trip.  The pictures don't do it justice, and my poor captions can't capture the adventures I had.  What a big wild land, I can't wait to go back.