It took 23 years of preference points to draw a Wyoming bighorn sheep tag. I had been talking with Cody Brown of Wind River Backcountry Outfitters, so I booked a 10-day hunt starting September 1, 2023.
My son, Kyle, met me at the outfitter’s location on August 30th. Tyson and Lane got the horses and mules ready the next morning and then we headed out for our backcountry camp. On the opening morning of hunting season, September 1st, we left camp early and saw some mule deer, bull elk, and sheep but nothing to shoot. Kyle spotted most of the game before the rest of us.
On the second day hunting, we saw a variety of different game species again. Tyson and Kyle saw some rams come out of a cave, and they viewed a dark-horned ram still in there, which Tyson figured was a big ram. The plan was to go back to this area tomorrow.
Day three of hunting started out dry, but by noon, we were getting rained on. We went up a drainage but turned around when the rain got so hard. All of us waited for it to stop and then ate our lunch. On the way back, Lane thought he had seen something, but it was only a stump. Kyle saw a sheep from his angle, but the rest of us had ridden off already. He caught up to us and asked what we had seen, and he told us what he saw. We turned around and went back, and now there were two rams. Tyson told me it was a good ram. I set up the tripod, put my suppressor onto my rifle, put it on my bipod, sat down on the ground, and ranged the ram at 278 yards. The fellows apparently were trying to set up to check him out when I shot, and nobody was ready for that. He went approximately 20 yards and was done.
On the way back to camp, there was a spectacular heat lightning display. All of a sudden, it began to pour and soon turned to hail. That is when the rodeo with Ruby, the mule, started. After I got her to stop, we waited until the hail finished and started out once again. My guides both said they had never seen heat lightning before.
Day four was very foggy, so we stayed in camp. It wasn’t until day five of the hunting season that we packed up everything, and by 9:00 a.m., we headed back out of the mountains. That afternoon, I started back home to Buffalo and made it back by dark.
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