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The Traveling Hunter

The Grand Slam
About North America's greatest hunting challenge

The Grand Slam refers to the taking of one of each of the four recognized varieties of North America’s wild sheep: Dall, Stone, Rocky Mountain bighorn, and desert bighorn. While the California bighorn is managed as another “race” of bighorns in British Columbia, California, Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, it is classed as a Rocky Mountain bighorn for the Grand Slam.

The term originated with the late Grancel Fitz, a Boone and Crockett Club member and one of the originators of the Boone and Crockett trophy measurement and records program. Writing of a hunt for Dall sheep in 1949 that completed his taking of all four varieties of wild sheep, Fitz titled his story for True magazine “A Grand Slam on Sheep.” Desert bighorn sheep hunter and guide Bob Householder began keeping an informal list of hunters that had accomplished the feat soon after, and the term saw wide usage in the writings of consummate outdoor writer Jack O’Connor (who was himself the fifth person to collect all four species).

The Grand Slam quickly became recognized as one of the great accomplishments in North American hunting--a pursuit demanding physical fitness and a huge investment of time and money to reach the far-flung game fields of the West. Hunters of the 1950s and 1960s had to travel by packstring into the remote corners of the northern Rocky Mountains to hunt Dall and Stone sheep and most Rocky Mountain bighorns, and to seek scarce desert bighorns among remote ranges in Mexico.

Today, the challenge to complete the Grand Slam is as great as ever. Travel is more convenient, but permits are scarce and demand high. Most hunters that complete the Grand Slam have pursued their goal with single-minded dedication spanning years or decades of effort and tough hunting. --Dale E. Toweill