In 2017, after many years of applying, my dad, David, drew a Nevada Desert sheep tag. It was the first sheep tag ever between the two of us. It was quite exciting! We made several scouting trips, and when it came time to hunt, we still didn’t have a real good plan. He didn’t have a huge group of people on the hunt, either, like some people have, but he did have my good friend, Jim, my uncle, Adrian, and me.
Starting out on day one, we picked a mountain range and went hunting. We saw a lot of sheep that day, including a really nice ram we snuck within 100 yards of, but my dad ended up not pulling the trigger.
The next day, we went to a different mountain to set up the spotting scopes. When we got to the spot where we were going to glass, I realized I forgot my binoculars. When we finished glassing, we drove back to camp to get my binos. We dropped Jim off halfway up the dirt road back to camp so he could glass the mountain above camp. When we came back down to pick him up, he said to take a look in the scope. Several miles up high on the mountain above camp, there were seven rams lying in the sun. It was a great spot by Jim, and as far away as they were, we could tell there were a couple great rams in the group. Being super excited, we probably didn’t think it through as well as we should have and ended up hiking all day to try and get close enough for a better look. They ended up giving us the slip and pretty much just humbled us to make us realize this wasn’t going to be easy.
We had some good rams spotted in an area, so we decided to try and hunt them again the next day. We smartened up a tiny bit and drove around the other side of the mountain where it wasn’t quite as steep of a climb. After a couple hours of glassing, we actually spotted the same group of rams in a weird spot several miles from where we lost them the previous day. We watched them bed down close to the peak, and we decided to go for it. Jim stayed on the spotting scope, and my dad and I started the sneak.
The sheep had a great view of everything, and because of that, we had to walk quite a few miles to get above them for a shot. It took about four hours to get in range, and unbelievably, they laid there the whole time. There was about an hour left of daylight, and the rams stood up and started feeding just before we peeked over the crest. They were 85 yards below us, and we counted six. One was really nice, and I almost had him shoot that ram, but I backed up and moved about 20 yards down and peeked over again and there was the seventh ram. I knew he was bigger than the rest, and his horns were even darker than the other six. I waved my dad over. He peeked over, got a good rest over a rock, and just like that, the hunt was over and the work began. We ended up finishing caping and skinning in the dark. It was a late night back to camp but quite relieving that he shot a great ram. We packed the meat out the next morning.
I was hoping to draw the same unit for my Desert sheep tag as well, being that I knew my away around the unit pretty well now. When the results came out in 2018, I couldn’t believe I had actually drawn it. It was pretty amazing having my Desert sheep tag for the same unit. My friend, Jim, and I made about 10 scouting trips in the late summer and fall. We saw a lot of rams and some really good ones.
The season opener was almost upon us, and as we set up camp, we had a pretty good plan. I had more people join us on this sheep hunt. I had my friends Jim, Tony, Adam, Martin, Uncle Adrian, and my dad. We scouted around the day before the opener, and I knew exactly where I wanted to be the next morning for opening day of sheep season. Of course, there was no sleep that night, so we got up early, hiked up the mountain, and at daylight, we couldn’t even locate a ewe. We split up different directions, and it wasn’t long before we were both looking at groups of sheep. I backtracked to get Jim so he could look at the rams I was looking at. We had previously talked about how I wasn’t going to pull the trigger until we both looked over the ram in the spotting scope and both agreed I should shoot. Well, it didn’t really work like that. When we arrived back to the spot to check out the rams, one of them had left the group and was moving fast along the ridge right toward us. It was a steep angle, and he was below us. It was to the point we were going to lose sight of him when he went by us. All this was happening way too fast, and we never had time to set up the spotting scope. There was one ram we talked about that I should shoot. Jim's brother, Don, and Jim saw him a week before the season opened and I was pretty sure I had seen him yesterday. We decided through the binoculars that this was that ram! I pulled the trigger, and with all the excitement, I missed the first shot. I got a second shot, and the ram was down. It wasn’t five minutes after I shot my ram, being in a fighter jet training area, that we got buzzed three times by two jets. The last pass was about as low as they could go. I don’t know if they were giving me a congrats fly-by or just wondering what we were doing, but it was pretty neat. At least they didn’t fly over like that before I shot!
My dad and I ended up both shooting a Desert sheep over 160" in the same unit one year apart! I would like to thank everyone who was a part of our sheep hunts. You guys made it a blast!
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