Twenty-six years, spilling past the quarter century mark, year upon year of doggedly applying for a sheep tag. The idea of one day opening the NDOW email and seeing the word “SHEEP” followed by the word “SUCCESSFUL” had become so unexpected that when Frank actually got it, he figured he must be reading it wrong. He’d drawn one of two Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep tags issued in the state of Nevada and the only tag for unit 102.
The obvious choice for a guide was Riley Manzonie of Current Creek Outfitters, a peerless wrangler with deep expertise in the Ruby Mountains. Riley’s livestock would carry our gear, and Frank, Jesse, Zach, and I would hike in. It sounded easy. A pack-in to base camp followed by moderately demanding day hunts.
Six days. It didn’t take long for the plan to falter. Sheep were nowhere to be found in the territory we could access from our base camp. Riley left us early one morning for an overnight walkabout, locating rams the next day that were inaccessible from our current location. We’d have to move. A trail on the other side of the Rubies would put us in reach of the area the rams were using. As fate would have it, that trail was too treacherous for even the mules. This endeavor had just morphed into a much more difficult backpack sheep hunt, an undertaking that would push each of us beyond any concept we had of our physical and mental endurance and leave one of us with a significant injury requiring surgical repair.
It was warm the following day as we piled out of the two trucks at the trailhead. A necessary refitting of our enterprise had us at odds with the clock. There were four miles of “straight up” between us and base camp at 9,600 feet. Racing a sun well into its post midday descent, our chests heaved while our hearts and boots pounded. I privately weighed the pros of setting up an alpine base in daylight versus darkness. Thankfully, we pitched camp just as night rolled out its purple, jeweled blanket across the sky.
Morning broke crisp and clear. The lighthearted banter as we prepared our packs for the hunt felt like a gauntlet thrown down in the face of the task before us. Above us at 1,300 vertical feet, a pass was visible that would allow us through to the other side of the towering peaks. Distant and inhospitable, it taunted us with the uncertain promise of rams on the other side. We left camp set up, anticipating a late return.
The trail was even steeper than it looked from below. Thighs burning, we crested a ridge halfway to the pass. Onwards, only sheer stone crags and steep bouldery rockslides. About 500 feet beneath the looming saddle, the path evaporated. Separating, each of us chose a route based on our level of uncomfortability with the vertigo-inducing drop-offs surrounding us.
Zach and Riley were over the crest of the saddle and glassing by the time I arrived, and Frank and Jesse were five minutes behind me. I sat down, and Zach motioned below, giving a thumbs up. It took a minute before I had the four ewes framed in my Swarovskis. I finally exhaled a breath I had been holding for the last five and a half days. Riley had been right, there were sheep here. I hustled back over the saddle to signal Jesse and Frank that we’d found sheep. Jesse came up first and settled in to glass. As Frank approached, I grinned ear to ear.
“There’s sheep,” I said with quiet excitement. “Ewes.”
Frank mustered a forced smile. “This happened on the climb up,” he said, pulling up his sleeve to reveal a softball-sized lump in the crook of his elbow.
“What the hell is that?” I blurted.
“My bicep tore clean off.” I swore. “Are you OK?”
“I will be. Let’s go find that ram.”
As afternoon overtook us, Riley’s pace became more determined. We couldn’t keep up with him as he dropped over the next ridge into a new drainage. By the time I got there, he and Zach were a few minutes into glassing. I picked a spot slightly uphill and off to their side so I could survey a sliver of countryside they couldn’t see directly below. The wind had picked up, and the temperature dropped as the sun closed in on the horizon. I got comfortable and started assessing the closest ground first. As I focused my binoculars, it took a second for my brain to register what I was seeing. Ram! Then another. And another. And...
“Pssst!”
Zach and Riley looked up at me. I pointed down the hill and then signaled “ram” with a gesture sometimes used to denote a lack of mental health, but in this instance, it was meant to imitate the curl of a ram’s horn on my head. The sheep casually grazed out and away from below us. Once we had everyone’s eyeballs on task, we spotted more and more until eventually we counted 16 rams. Several were decent, but one really stood out.
Riley put the question to Frank, and he immediately answered, “That’s the one. Let’s go kill him.”
In the hour we’d spent field judging, the rams had migrated to the opposite side of the basin 900 yards away, moving in and out of view. No one had eyes on the big ram. It was time for Frank and Riley to make their move. Jesse, Zach, and I stayed put to surveil, hoping to pinpoint the ram while Frank and Riley made their way across the drainage.
Zach spotted the ram bedded on the backside of a small rock outcropping, but neither Frank nor Riley could see him now that they were mid-drainage. Finally, they made it far enough around and above the outcropping to see the monarch bedded on the other side 80 yards away.
I saw the shot before I heard it. Kaboom! Kherwhop! I watched the ram cartwheel down the hillside. Pictures. Processing. Divvying. Darkness.
The scramble back to base camp would be far too risky in the dark with loaded packs. Low on provisions and with no overnight gear, the only logical option was to drop 4,000 feet down the mountain to a road miles away in the foothills, a route none of us had ever traveled. The only assurance onX could give us was that we were in for a long night. Riley made a call and arranged for his wife to meet us at the road.
Almost immediately, our progress slowed to a crawl, side-hilling under and over downed trees in steep, tortuous thickets interspersed with boulder slides. The darkness was claustrophobic. Feeling like a rat in a maze, the threat of injury to one or more of us gnawed at my consciousness. Finally, we broke through onto the relatively open ridge that we’d planned on riding down to the foothills,
hoping the worst of it was behind us. That ember of hope snubbed out by the first of many cliffs. We were forced to retreat back up and then down the side of the ridge and around the bottom of the escarpment before climbing back up to the spine, only to get cliffed out a short time later. Over and over again. This rendition of reverse leapfrogging was still preferable to clawing through the suffocating thickets hemming us in.
We took turns sliding, tripping, and falling down. Our food was long gone. We coaxed the last drops of water from our hydration bladders. Within a mile of the road, the ridgeline dumped headlong into an especially menacing thicket. Wracked by incessant leg cramps, I fell behind in a daze. When I caught up, I found Jesse and Frank resting next to a creek, patiently waiting for me and my water filter. Riley and Zach had pushed ahead. We spent several minutes replenishing our parched bodies and long, dry water reservoirs. An hour later, brains numb and bodies aching, we stumbled to the truck, beaten down by deprivation and overexertion. We’d been on our feet for 20 hours. However, we had made it, all of us scratched, bruised, and battered. With the exception of Frank’s bicep, we were miraculously uninjured.
In my dream, I was walking, but all I wanted to do was lie down. One foot in front of the other in near total darkness, keeping pace in my mind. An incessant beeping. I awoke and shut off the alarm.
Ringing.
“Hello?” A groggy voice answered.
“Good morning! Zach, it’s Charles. You up for going with me to pack our camp off the mountain?”
“Yup!”
Those hours of camaraderie, giving more than we knew we had towards a common goal, have served as an inflection point in all our lives. These events and the friendship of the men I shared the experience with are gifts as dear as any I have received.
For Frank.
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