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Five Times Lucky
A dream is realized on a hunt for desert bighorn sheep in Arizona.
by Dale E. Toweill

In the dim light before dawn, I strained to identify the features of the opposite hillside: black boulders providing sharp contrast with yellow grasses, cholla cactus, scattered palo verde trees.

Suddenly my guide, Mike Scott, said, “There he is! Look at the base of that big black boulder near the top!”

There he was, indeed. As my eyes strained in the dim light, everything suddenly came into focus: the curl of yellow horn, sharp in contrast with the rock behind it. The horizontal line of the bedded ram’s back. The alert posture of the head as the ram stared intently across the rocky slope. Following its gaze, I quickly discovered a second ram slowly picking its way across the slope, alternately nibbling on grass and carefully plucking cholla fruits as it worked toward the bedded ram. As it neared the other ram, the newcomer lifted and turned its head, displaying its own magnificent horns. The bedded ram rose. Squaring off, the two rams reared on hind legs and clashed horns in the dim morning light--a ritual, it seemed, between friends. The clash completed, each ram appeared to lose interest in the other, and the two great rams turned away from each other, drifting slowly apart as they slowly fed their way across the hillside.

It was December 2005 in the New Water Mountains west of Phoenix. The Arizona desert bighorn sheep season was open, and I had a tag in my pocket.

As the first ram slowly fed out of sight around the distant peak, its challenger stuck its head among the branches of a palo verde tree to nibble the small green leaves and nutritious seed pods. With the rams momentarily unable to see us, Mike whispered, “Let’s go!” and he, assistant guide Jay Myers, and I quickly moved across a grassy opening to begin our stalk.

Four Times Lucky

This hunt was the culmination of dreams for me—an opportunity to hunt desert bighorn sheep. I’ve lived in Idaho for more than two decades, and it was in Idaho that my quest for bighorn sheep began in 1988 when I received a permit for California bighorns. As a resident, I took advantage of the opportunity to scout nearly every weekend prior to my hunt, hiking through more than a hundred miles of sagebrush desert and canyonland. Even so, I didn’t harvest a ram until day fifteen of the sixteen-day season, passing smaller but legal rams while I searched for the sheep of my dreams.

Idaho allows hunters to harvest two bighorns in a lifetime if they can draw the permits, and three years later I received a permit for a Rocky Mountain bighorn deep in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Twice lucky in obtaining a coveted permit, I chartered a flight to a backcountry airstrip, and friends and I backpacked from there into the hunt area. We hiked many hours over the next few days to reach tiny basins high above the Salmon River, but we had yet to find a wild sheep when the season opened. As we planned our assault on yet another high basin, a huge, ten-year-old ram appeared on the slopes above, traveling the river canyon with a younger ram. Earlier plans were forgotten as we stalked the two bighorns, and I took my second and last Idaho bighorn an hour later.

Bitten hard by sheep-hunting fever, I scrimped and saved, turning my attention northward. A few years later I met Rick Furniss at the national convention of the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, and before the convention was over Duncan Gilchrist and I had arranged a backpack hunt with Rick into the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territory. It was there, three times lucky, that I found myself on top of a rocky, barren peak opposite a battle-scarred ram that crumpled at my shot—and then rolled once, twice, picked up speed, and tumbled far downhill. It took forever, it seemed, to climb down to where the ram finally stopped. Relieved to find the horns and cape intact, I noticed that the cape was soiled from the long tumble . . . and then I realized that the color wasn’t due to dirt, but to a mixture of black hairs across the shoulders and back.  I had taken a Fannin sheep—classed as a Stone sheep rather than a Dall.

Two years later, my quest for a Dall ram took me on another backpack hunt in the Mackenzies, this one with Stan Simpson. After days of hiking into the mountains near the Keele River southwest of Norman Wells, I harvested yet another magnificent ram.

Four times lucky, I found myself a “3/4-slammer” needing only a desert bighorn to complete my Grand Slam.

But a permit for a desert bighorn sheep seemed an impossible dream. Few permits are available, and only a tiny fraction of those are available to nonresident hunters. A few tags are auctioned annually, but those tags sell for tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and permits to hunt in Mexico, though often less expensive, were still far beyond my budget.

Still, I tried. I faithfully applied every year for desert bighorn sheep permits, buying licenses and accumulating bonus points. I attended conventions, purchased tickets, and entered special drawings for desert bighorn permits, all to no avail. And then it happened: I performed my annual ritual of checking the online results of Arizona’s hunt drawing and read “Desert Bighorn Sheep: Hunt 6029, permit number 1.” I stared at my computer, surprised that Arizona Fish and Game had listed my application rather than hunt drawing results. Then it hit me—I’d drawn a permit! With rising excitement, I quickly navigated to review my count of accumulated bonus points. The balance, formerly at 11, now read 0. Five times lucky, I was going to hunt desert bighorn sheep in Arizona!

I knew only a little about the area. I had been there once, in 1995, when I had volunteered for a weekend working with the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society to install a “guzzler” for bighorn sheep. I remembered the steep, rocky slopes rising steeply from the desert floor—excellent bighorn sheep habitat.

Although the season didn’t open until December, my hunt began the day I learned I had drawn a permit. I immediately bought topographic maps of my hunt area and studied them to learn key features and place names. I called Mike Scott of White Cloud Outfitters in Challis, Idaho, a long-time friend and an Arizona-licensed outfitter. I knew Mike was a sheep fanatic like me, and I quickly booked him to arrange my hunt. I called biologists and friends with firsthand knowledge of the area and desert bighorns. Summer vanished in a haze of activity, and soon I was on my way to Arizona.

A Lot of Looking

I arrived in Phoenix a few days after Thanksgiving. Assistant guide Jay Myers was waiting at the airport, and picked me out of the crowd as soon as he saw the camo daypack I carried. We introduced ourselves, and almost immediately headed west under a starlit sky. Arriving at camp a little before midnight, I found a cot with my sleeping bag on it, and settled in. I wouldn’t see the camp in daylight until more than a week later.

Awakened in the predawn hours for a quick breakfast, I checked my equipment while Mike introduced me to guide Larry Heathington and brought me up to date.

“We’ve seen bighorns every day,” Mike told me. “But we haven’t found any large rams yet. Larry saw a ram that might score in the mid-160s a few weeks ago, but he may have moved. We’ll scout the north side today. We need to get rolling before the sun comes up.”

Mike explained that desert bighorn sheep typically bed high on the rocky slopes at night, but rise at first light and move quickly downhill to feed, selecting the tender green leaves of ocotillo and palo verde as well as cured grasses. Our goal was to be in place to glass the slopes early, before the rams moved into one of the many basins or bedded out of the wind or sun.

I am a professional biologist, and I’ve had a lot of experience looking for bighorn sheep. I even spent a number of years conducting research on bighorn sheep in Idaho, but I quickly learned a few tricks from Mike and Larry. My 10X binoculars were sharp and clear, but they paled when compared with Mike’s 15X tripod-mounted binoculars for locating sheep. While my eyes tired after twenty or thirty minutes of coping with hand-held wobble, Mike’s tripod-mounted binoculars allowed him to continue to search the distant slopes, and having a tripod-mounted spotting scope handy allowed him to quickly identify distant features that might (or might not) belong to a bedded bighorn. Although I prided myself on being able to spot bighorns, Mike routinely located bighorns at staggering distances: three miles, even four miles when conditions were right. I struggled to find bighorns before Mike pointed them out, but it rarely happened.

Much of my hunting area was designated wilderness, sandwiched between Interstate 10 and the natural gas pipeline north of the Kofa Wilderness. The New Water Mountains, low and rugged, marked the eastern boundary; to the west was a collection of small rocky basins, and, even further west, Black Mesa dominated the landscape before dropping off sharply to Interstate 95 south of the town of Quartzite. Success would depend on careful glassing of distant slopes and hiking into each hilly basin.

Every day we glassed distant slopes for bighorns, beginning before the sun appeared above the horizon. Often, we hiked into the wilderness in the predawn hours, trying to reach vantage points to observe bighorns traveling to feeding areas. Midday usually involved moving from one vantage point to another. Some days we hiked into wilderness basins that couldn’t be glassed from a distance, carefully easing over each ridgeline, searching the shadows and outcrops for bedded bighorns. Only after it was too dark to glass did we hike to our parked vehicles and return to camp, arriving well after dark. The evening ritual involved sharing observations as we pulled cactus thorns from shins and clothing.

As the hours and days ticked by, November turned into December and the season opened, so I started carrying a rifle in addition to my pack filled with water, field glasses, lunch, and other essentials.

Each day added to our knowledge of the area. Windy days resulted in few observations of bighorns; they apparently sought shelter in basins and canyons out of view. Most groups of ewes and young didn’t move around much, while the larger rams seemed to cover a lot of ground. One late afternoon Larry watched as two rams repeatedly clashed horns, rising on rear legs and falling forward—behavior usually shown only by mature rams. Although the bighorns were too far distant to determine horn size, we spent hours looking for them the following day. We located four rams, but none were mature.

One night at dinner, Larry said, “I found a good ram today, a ram that will score about 165 points. I got a really good look at him, and he’s young—only about six years old. There are no scars across his nose, and his horn tips are barely broomed. He’s pretty, and he’s got potential to be a great ram if he lives a few years longer. I’m pretty sure we can locate him tomorrow if you want him.”

But I decided I’d rather have an old, mature ram than a younger animal, even if that meant it didn’t score as well--and we hadn’t yet covered the entire hunt area. We chose to keep on searching.

Trophy hunting can be tough physically, but it’s even tougher mentally. Every legal ram passed up lurks in memory, haunting the hunter unsure whether there is a bigger ram in the area and whether it can be found within the days allotted by season and circumstance. We hadn’t located a mature ram in a week of hunting, and several resident hunters we’d met during the week indicated there weren’t many large rams in the area—perhaps none. The next day as we hunted wilderness basins, finding bighorn tracks but only ewes and young rams, I grappled with this particular demon, wondering if I might go home without a desert bighorn ram because I set my goal too high.

When Mike, Jay, and I stumbled into camp that night tired and sore, Larry asked about our day. We told him about the country, and what we’d seen. When we asked about his day, he said simply, “I found two shooters—big rams, traveling together.”

The announcement sent adrenaline rushing through my body. Tired muscles were forgotten; dinner was a formality that I can’t recall. But I vividly remember Larry’s account. He’d been scouting a new area, away from typical bighorn habitat. The rams and an ewe were on a low peak, where he had watched them throughout the afternoon. Both rams were mature, with horns approaching full curl.

A Possible Dream

Now, after the agony of uncertainty that had plagued me the day before, followed by a sleepless night and an early start, I found myself stalking one of the rams as the day dawned.

We crossed the grassy opening undetected, and climbed the ridge opposite the ram as it fed downhill in the predawn light. At a small, rocky outcrop a few hundred yards from the big ram, Mike stopped and motioned me forward, whispering, “Two hundred yards. There’s no need to hurry. Shoot whenever you’re ready.”

I watched the ram in my scope as it fed slowly and turned its head and those massive horns first to the left, then to the right. Finally, it offered a broadside shot, and I squeezed the trigger. The great ram crumpled, a small cloud of rising dust catching the first rays of sunlight, marking the spot where it fell. No one moved. We stared intently at the spot where the great ram fell, but it didn’t rise.

Mike’s face split into a huge grin as he turned to me and held out his hand. “Congratulations! You’ve just completed your Grand Slam!”

A few minutes later, as I admired the magnificent ram, thoughts of other hunts, other mountains, and other rams flooded my memory. Five times lucky and blessed beyond belief, I understood in those moments that the Grand Slam refers to more than just accomplishment of a difficult task. Those who complete it are members of a group of hunters whose passion for wild places and commitment to wildlife conservation is a bond that will last long past the days when our bodies can propel us to distant mountain ranges and impossibly steep mountains.

It’s still a possible—and worthy—dream.

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