Here is the story, as published in the Washington Sheep Foundation magazine and Huntin' Fool:
Having already drawn mountain goat in Idaho and pronghorn and mule deer in Nevada, I was hopeful I would draw elk in Washington (I did), but completely blown away to also be successful for sheep. This is one of those tags I apply for every year, but never expect to get in my lifetime. But as my second sheep tag pulled from the lotteries in three years, I am proof that you have to have your name in the pot to draw.
Despite being my second choice, I knew what I had in the Swakane tag. The 191" world record CA bighorn came from this unit just two years ago. So I went to the Washington hunting forums, Huntin' Fool, and the Washington Sheep Foundation to get in contact with the past tag holders and anybody else who knew the unit, which turned out to be quite a few people.
I was living in Japan at the time so all of my early scouting happened over the phone. I moved back to the U.S. in early August, having quit my job to make time to hunt my six tags in the fall. I was able to make a quick trip over to Wenatchee in August to take a look at the unit, but it was so hot that I wasn't able to spot any big rams. On August 10th my dad and I embarked on the first of the six hunts, which would take me until November 19th.
After killing my NV pronghorn on the second day of the season, we hurried back home and I took a day to resupply, then headed over to Swakane for 18 days of scouting. Every day I photographed the bigger rams I was finding and then I'd run into the Wenatchee library where I'd forward the pictures to my email list of sheep experts. Two days later I'd check back on the score estimates and send out new pictures.
[Scouting from across the river. I was up from 4-5am every day, depending on how far I intended to drive for the morning's scouting.]
The week before opening day a lightning storm came through from the West and started over 130 fires in the county. I was instructed by the Forest Service to evacuate quickly so I grabbed everything of value, threw it in the trailer, and hurried into Wenatchee, where the flames were burning at the edge of town. When I awoke the next morning the smoke was so thick I couldn't see across the Columbia River and the roads into my unit were all closed. I was allowed back in later that day but I had to check in with the Forest Service daily. The large map at the entrance of the FS office had a small hole in the middle that was not burning. That hole was the Swakane unit.
[the lightning that nearly ruined my hunt]
[fires on the edge of Wenatchee]
[one of the bigger rams that was being evaluated]
[not up for evaluation]
[another ram (on the left) that was included in the talks]
[he's pretty big]
On September 12th I was up high scouting down some ridges when somebody started a fire just above me on Burch Mountain. As I drove down the mountain I passed eight fire trucks and the sheriff, who threatened to ticket me for driving on a closed road (the county had closed the gate at the bottom while I was up scouting). Fortunately they got the fire out that night, but the result was that the Burch Mtn. road was closed to access by anybody, even the guy with the once-in-a-lifetime sheep tag. This severely limited my access, as I could now only come up from the bottom. Fortunately I'd patterned all the big rams and I could reach them fairly easily.
[When I took this photo a fire had started above me on the mountain. As I returned to the truck a low-flying plane circled the mountaintop seven times. When I drove out I could see the fire and I ran into the guy who started it - he was walking down the road and talking to the sheriff on the phone.]
As opening day approached I had narrowed down my list to three big rams, though there was still one missing. The previous year's hunter had chosen between two rams of comparable size and the ram he took scored 179", so the prevailing belief was there should be another ram in the 180"+ range (nicknamed "Full Curl"). But the scores coming back on the biggest ram I'd photographed were only about 178" - and the character of his horns was definitely different than Full Curl.
On September 14th Rob and Shawn (huntnphool and popeshawnpaul) drove over and another friend I made on my Snake River sheep hunt two years came up from Oregon. After scouting during the day we went to Shawn's parents' house in the evening and laid out paper prints of the photos I'd taken and put them up digitally on the big screen tv. For four hours we picked apart the rams and wrote down pages of scores. Shawn is a good field judger so he gave his best guess on the scores with lower and upper limits. We had a clear 'largest' ram from everything I'd accumulated during the previous 18 days, but my hangup was the missing ram. Shawn examined Full Curl from a few 2011 pictures and figured he would be comparable to the current largest ram, or maybe even smaller.
[Comparing rams on the big screen]
On opening morning we checked some rams above camp while Shawn and Rob checked along the highway. We met across from where the biggest ram was living with his 10 younger proteges. They'd been on the same hillside everyday for a week, but this morning they'd disappeared. Fortunately just as Shawn and Rob arrived they'd caught a glimpse of three small rams ducking over the ridge.
Shawn had stayed up in front of the big screen another couple hours the previous evening so he got out the pictures on the hood of Rob's truck and explained his updated thinking, which was that this ram was the biggest in the unit even if Full Curl existed. He estimated the ram would score about 178-180". My season was 3.5 weeks long so I wasn't in a hurry to kill a ram, but by the same token I didn't want to unnecessarily waste time and let the ram relocate or disappear. The Swakane unit is large enough to hide a ram from me. I hemmed and hawed until 10am when I finally decided to make a push on the big ram and if things worked out perfectly, I'd take him. Being the only tag holder in the unit was certainly a luxury!
Shawn and my uncle Barrie opted to watch from the road while my dad, Rob, Shane, and I climbed up the ridge for the stalk. They optimistically carried pack frames while I tried to focus on remaining calm for one of the biggest stalks of my life.
As we approached the top of the ridge the old guys ditched their packs and brought out the video cameras while I fine-tuned my tip-toeing. We crossed the ridge two abroad and two behind. I quickly spotted some feeding rams just 50 yards away that had us pinned. I scanned but could not pick up the big guy. The rams got nervous and busted out to our left, taking the whole herd with them. There was a brief opportunity on the big ram when they came up on the opposing ridge, but at 300 yards and not a very clear shot, we let them walk. From there they crossed the immediate drainage, went around the next ridge, and hopefully settled into the next drainage. The four of us gathered our belongings and headed off in pursuit, hoping the rams were waiting for us around the corner.
An hour later we found ourselves on top of the neighboring ridge poking into the next drainage trying to spot the rams before they picked us up. When we neared the head of the creek my three partners stopped and told me to go in alone. They all wanted to be there for the shot, but not enough to risk being responsible for blowing out the rams.
The air was still and the foliage crunchy, so I literally crawled my way closer. It took 1.5 hours of shifting a foot with each breeze to get myself into position to catch glimpses of horn below and ahead. I waited and waited and waited. Then a ram stood up. Then a ram walked through a window. Then two rams walked through. Then I stood up. The rams were moving left-to-right 150 yards below me. I spotted the big one in the lead, but his cohorts wouldn't give me a clean window and I wasn't about to take a risky shot and accidentally put a banana horn down. The breeze blew up the canyon and the rams bunched up, on high alert. Suddenly they turned and ran back up canyon. I had a lot of windows so I sat down and found an anchor in a neighboring tree stump as the band stopped on an open hillside. The big ram was in the lead with nothing between me and him, but he had smaller rams behind and below him. I hesitated, nervous about missing his body and taking down the wrong ram. But the longer I sat leaning against the tree, the more the crosshairs settled in behind his shoulder and I convinced myself I couldn't miss this 175 yard shot. So I squeezed the trigger on my Kimber 84L Montana .270. Chaos erupted as the band of rams ran back under me while one ram struggled in the dirt, stood up, then fell over and rolled down the hill. As the guys with video cameras hurried to me the first thing I said was "I hope I shot the right ram!" I proceeded to recount the story on video before we all nervously descended towards the brush at the bottom of the hill.
I know the feeling of taking such a huge CA ram should be nothing but elation, but all I felt was relief when I walked up to him. The shot I took, with smaller rams standing close to him, made me uncomfortable after it was over. Seeing the long right horn, the huge bases, and the brooming on the left made me happy I hadn't messed up. We all dream about securing a tag like this, but the pressure that can come along with it is enormous. I am getting better about managing that, but I probably need a few more sheep tags before I'm really good.
We moved the ram out of the heavy brush and into a location with a beautiful background, then Rob directed me through an hour of photography. We caped the ram and boned out the meat just in time for darkness. We'd left that morning at 11am for what we thought would be a 3-hour hunt, so we were all running out of water and energy and my dad didn't have a headlamp. It was a brutal hike down, but we finally reached the bottom a couple hours later.
Shawn invited us over to his house where we had pizza, showers, and slept in beds. We did a rough score on the ram at 178" before dropping the head in the chest freezer.
I took about five days off after the sheep hunt then headed to Idaho for my backcountry goat hunt (
http://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php?topic=121563.0). After harvesting the goat I went 12 miles back in for elk but could only find a raghorn. I went straight from Idaho to my Washington elk hunt in the Blues, where I harvested a low 300's bull on a tough, but fun hunt. I then went back to Idaho and flew into the Frank Church Wilderness to explore a new area for mule deer. I hunted and camped in snow for ten days but couldn't find what I was looking for before season closed. My hunting season spanned 89 days afield hunting or scouting.
The final score on the ram was 177 1/8" B&C.
