For
about a quarter of a century I have been attempting to draw a Montana Fish,
Wildlife & Parks “Special Tag” for hunting moose, mountain goat or bighorn
sheep. Now I’ve added bison to the unobtainable list. Thus far, even with the
“benefits” of the Bonus Point system, I haven’t drawn shit. As I tally up the
years, mileage and injuries I’ve acquired, I’m getting a little nervous. I
don’t know how many years I have left in which I will still be physically able
to hunt the high country for sheep and goats.
Montana
does have some “Unlimited” bighorn sheep hunting districts where a person can
simply buy an over-the-counter tag. These represent the only opportunity in the
Lower 48 States for a hunter to actually purchase,
a bighorn sheep tag, as opposed to attempt to draw one tag via a lottery
system.
The major reason why the state can have these five
unlimited districts is that the country in question is steeper than a cow’s
face and rougher than a cob; rocky, isolated, and hard to access. The units are
in the National Forests and Wilderness areas just north of Yellowstone National Park.
Some of this terrain, like the Boulder
River and Beartooth Mountain
units, consists almost entirely of loose rocks piled just a few degrees shy of
vertical. It kicked my ass twenty-odd years ago when I was still in my prime.
Now, I have to take a three ibuprofen just to look at a topo map of the area.
Jack Atcheson, the premiere sheep hunting guide who used to work the unlimited
districts around Yellowstone told Duncan Gilchrist, author of the Land of Giant Rams
books, “Some hunters arrive, look at the immense size of the country, become
depressed and leave immediately.”
One must also factor mountain weather into the mix. It can
and does snow every month of the year in the northern Rockies.
I once found myself plodding through three inches of snow in a genuine blizzard
atop a high, barren ridge in the Big Belt Mountains, and in Idaho I awoke one
fine morning to find ice rattling around in my canteens…both these events
occurred during the balmy old month of August.
The areas in question are also very thick
with grizzly bears which, after forty years of Federal protection, have come to
believe that they are officially at the top of the food chain. Rather than
fearing man, they have come to regard us as delightfully fat, slow and rather
defenseless (no horns, claws, or teeth to speak of) sources of protein. A rifle
shot is actually a “dinner bell” to some bears who’ve discovered the report
means, at the very least, a yummy gut pile, if not an entire elk, that they can
confiscate from the plump orange two-legged critters who waddle hastily out of
the way.
Merely traveling into these areas is hard; you can get
horses and mules into the approaches to the mountains that hold sheep, but to
hunt the high country itself you have to do a lot of arduous walking. Finding a
legal ram is even harder. Due to the high elevation and tough winters, the
unlimited district rams have a reputation for slow horn growth. From 2000 to
2013, only one ram measuring over 40 inches has been harvested from the Yellowstone area units.
Since
it appears that my odds of drawing a bighorn tag for a limited hunting district
are significantly less than my odds of being elected president, I decided it’s
time to hunt the unlimited districts while I still can. So I’ve been
researching the two “easiest” to get to unlimited bighorn districts, Unit 300
(Gallatin-Yellowstone) and Unit 303 (South Absaroka).
They’re in the same county that I reside in but, Montana counties being what they are, still
require a 90-plus mile drive one-way for me to get there.
The
Gallatin-Yellowstone has about the smallest geographic area, although it still
covers a wide swath of tough country, and an early ten-day season starting September 1st. Mountain
weather being what it is, I like the idea of the early September hunt. Despite
the fact that 40-odd hunters scoured the place each season, for the past two
years Unit 300’s two-ram quota has gone unfilled, and many years only one ram
is bagged.
South Absaroka covers a much larger area, but has a little “easy”
access in the southwest corner, where you can drive to pretty high elevations
above Gardiner and Jardine. There are pockets of resident sheep throughout the
area, if you can find their haunts, but many people gamble on waiting for the
really big rams to migrate out of Yellowstone
Park to their winter
range on the National Forest in mid to late October. There’s always a chance
that the quota will be filled and season closed before the big boys leave the
park. The 303 quota usually gets filled and, if you hunt above Gardiner, there’s
the very nice benefit of being able to camp in a vehicle or camper, always a
plus in grizzly country.
Since I haven’t hunted the country around Gardiner for
almost two decades and need to do a lot of scouting, the timing seemed
fortuitous when my neighbor down the road, whom I’ll call “Uncle Si”, asked if
I wanted to go with him on a sheep hunt in Unit 300. I agreed to tag along because
he’s in his late 60’s and missing half a lung. He wanted me to go along because,
as an artilleryman in Vietnam,
he’s deaf as a post and worries that a grizzly could walk right up to him
without him ever knowing it. Having served in armor, I’m only half deaf and I
wore my hearing aids.
For reasons I’ll detail in a post of is own, neither one of
us carries pepper spray. Since I didn’t have a sheep tag and no other big game
seasons were open, it was my intention to just pack my 4-inch Smith &
Wesson Model 629 .44 Magnum in case we ran into a bear. Uncle Si, who was
hunting with a single-shot Thompson-Center rifle in 7mm Remington Magnum,
wanted me to bring a rifle too. This didn’t quite seem right to me, so I phoned
the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks office to ask about this. It isn’t
technically illegal to carry a rifle for protection under such circumstances,
but they really preferred I didn’t.
I
compromised between the two by bringing my smoothbore slug-barreled Model 870
Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun, with a single one-ounce deer slug in the tube
and the extended magazine filled with double-ought buckshot. Plenty of
firepower but decidedly short-ranged and defensive in nature, nothing a normal
human would be able to poach a sheep with. In hind sight it was simply a whole
lot of extra, unnecessary weight to carry. Thankfully, I had at least installed
a sling some time back, which made it much easier to tote around.
Uncle Si had supposedly hunted the country in question his
whole life, bagged plenty of nice elk up in Tom Miner Basin, and knew the area like the back
of his hand. So, I foolishly left my topo map folded up in my belt pouch and
trustingly fell in behind ye olde mountain man, assuming he knew right where he
was going. I completely forget about another mountain man maxim expressed by
Brian Keith as Henry Frapp in the old 1980 movie The Mountain Men. “Naw, I ain’t never been lost. Powerful confused
for a month or two, but I ain’t never been lost.”
Our goal, Sheep Mountain, as seen from Specimen Ridge, the closest we got to it.
We started hiking through the timber, which featured plenty
of blow-down, at first light. Around noon, we emerged some 2,500 feet higher
atop a nameless 9,321-foot peak that turned out to be two drainages and well
over four air miles, and about twice that in trail distance, from our intended
target of Sheep Mountain. We were too far away to even
glass for sheep with the spotting scope.
So we wound up spending the rest of the day hiking as well,
taking the most direct route possible back down to the truck. The most direct
route possible turned out to be Specimen Ridge. It was not a route I would have
chosen considering the age and shakiness of our knees at the moment, but we
just took it nice and slow with the aid of our walking sticks. In places, the
ridge narrows down to a few yards or even feet in width, with craggy vertical
cliffs dropping dizzily away on either side. Footsore, soaked with sweat, and
dog-tired, we stumbled back down an old logging road to the truck as darkness
was falling. We’d covered somewhere around seven plus miles, of which distance
approximately six inches consisted of flat ground.
We hiked back down Specimen Ridge for about 2 miles to get past the cliffs to descend to our starting point.
Of
course, it wasn’t all bad. As they say, the worst day of hunting still trumps
the best day of work. A couple of brief morning rain showers greeted us and
these had cleared out the thick gray pall of drift smoke from a big forest fire
near West Yellowstone that had been obscuring the valleys. This opened up the
achingly beautiful long distance vistas of the mountains in all directions.
Twenty miles to the west we could see the barren reddish
rock of isolated, flat-topped Sphinx Mountain in the Madison Range
rising 10,840 feet against the silver blue sky and through the binos we could
make out the ski runs around Big Sky. To the northwest, beyond a series of
smooth, yellow grass covered ridges and darkly timbered draws, were prominent
features of the Gallatin Range like Ramshorn
Peak and Fortress and Steamboat Mountain. To the northeast, across the
flat patchwork of irrigated alfalfa fields in Paradise
Valley, the peaks of the Absarokas
pushed against the sky, the northern-most some forty odd miles away near Livingston. To the south, we could see far into to heart
of Yellowstone National
Park, Quadrant Mountain and Antler Peak
dropping away through stands of timber to the open green grasslands of Swan
Lake Flats where the sun occasionally glinted on steel and glass as vehicles
passed along the silver thread of the park road.
And, of course, to the east we could see our currently
unobtainable goal, 10,095-foot Sheep
Mountain, the
communication site on the east summit gleaming white in the sunshine. Long,
smooth grassy ridges stretched out towards us like fingers, the draws between
them dark green with thick stands of timber. Between us lay a helluva lot of
steep, rocky, tough ground.
Of the last nine rams harvested in Unit 300, five were
taken on Sheep Mountain, so it got hit pretty hard. We
saw five other sheep hunters and/or their partners, two pairs like use and one
lone-wolf. We also ran into two mounted YNP Rangers patrolling the pack trail
that roughly parallels the park boundary.
In
many places, on the way in, the dwarf huckleberry was turning scarlet and the
tiny leaves of the grouse whortleberry were golden. There weren’t many berries
on the more open hillsides, where the leaves were already beginning to get dry
and crunchy, but where there was a little more moisture at the bottoms of the
draws we found a nice crop. We paused briefly a few times to pick sweet juicy
fat purple huckleberries, glossy black wild currants that made our faces
pucker, and some coarse red thimbleberries whose broad leaves were also turning
yellow.
Although the area is in the heart of grizzly bear country,
and in spite of the fact that a well-known local bullshitter claimed to have
seen no less than thirteen grizzly bears up there the previous day, we saw very
little sign. None of the berry bushes had been worked over by bears and we came
across only one rather old pile of scat and a solitary lodgepole pine trunk
that bore grizzly claw marks. There wasn’t much deer or elk sign, either, and
the few moose doots we saw were very old and dry. It wasn’t until we got up
atop the high ridges that we found any sheep tracks and droppings.
We
kicked up a couple of mountain grouse. The first was a long way from the ridge
yet so, when he landed in a nearby tree, I slipped a #6 birdshot shell into the
shotgun and nailed him. Such was the nature of the terrain that I had to follow
a trail of feathers for twenty plus yards to find the grouse. He had fallen
lifelessly from the tree, hit the ground, and bounced and rolled like a soccer
ball down the steep slope for quite a ways before lodging against a fallen tree
trunk.
The
trees at the beginning of our journey were a mix of rough-barked Douglas fir
and arrow-straight lodgepole pine stands. These gave way to smooth trunked
subalpine or “piss” fir on the slopes and some dark spruce in the draws.
Finally, getting closer to timberline, the tops of the ridges were decorated
with gnarled, twisted, wind-battered whitebark pine. Occasional black-and-gray Clark’s nutcrackers flew from tree to tree giving
metallic squawks; nutcracker and pine squirrel caches of whitebark pine cones
and nuts are a favorite staple of the grizzly bear. A great many of these pines were now only
dead gray skeletons, the victims of white pine blister rust, a fungal disease
introduced from Europe. The tiny spores are
borne easily on the wind, so that even isolated “island” mountain ranges like
the Crazies have been affected.
The area is also part of the Gallatin Petrified Forest and
we enjoyed seeing the petrified wood nearly everywhere we went. The trees were
supposedly buried upright and standing 50 million years ago by lava, mud flows
and volcanic ash, then petrified via silica and quartz seeping into their
cells. In some places, the white petrified trees were embedded within the rock
of the cliff faces, which are often composed of volcanic conglomerates. Water
and wind have sculpted these conglomerates via erosion into strange shapes,
pillars and balanced rocks.
"Uncle Si" and the petrified tree.
Traipsing
down Specimen Ridge, we came across the still-standing petrified trunk of a
giant old tree that must have been ten or twelve feet across at the base. Its
sheer size made us wonder how high the actual tree must have reached when
living. The Eocene Age when these trees were alive must have been much warmer,
for such species as sycamores, magnolias, chestnuts and oaks have been
identified in the petrified forest.
On our initial way down Specimen Ridge, we also surprised a
nice mountain goat billy who was bedded down in the shade of the stunted piss
firs that adorned the top of the ridge. Having domestic goats of my own, I
could just about read the comically distraught expression on his bearded face
and in his coal black eyes. Of course he was long gone by the time I got my camera out. The sleek-haired, snow white goat trotted past us
within 25 yards or so and then disappeared over the edge of the nearest cliff.
For the rest of the hike, whenever we could look back and see the east-facing
aspects of the ridge we glassed for him, but it was as if he had disappeared
into thin air.
By the time we hiked all the way down Specimen Ridge to
where the slope moderated enough for us to dive off the west side, I was weary,
footsore, and getting dehydrated even though I’d packed in three quarts…or six
pounds…of water. Thankfully, we had a cooler with Gatorade and bottled water in
the back of the truck. As I sat on the tailgate and guzzled my first Gatorade,
I checked my watch and noted that it took three full minutes for my ass to come
dragging in behind us.
Driving back down Tom
Miner Road, within a mile of the aptly named
Grizzly Creek, there were a couple of vehicles stopped along the side of the
road so we stopped to take a gander as well. About 300 yards off the road, two
grizzly bears were making their way across a wide open yellow grassy meadow
against a backdrop of brilliant green white-barked quaking aspen.
Da Bears...viewed from a nice, safe distance.
They looked like they had been eating well, and their sleek
brown pelts were obviously frosted with the traditional “grizzled” white-tipped
guard hairs. Their shoulder humps were clearly apparent and despite the fat they
carried on their well-rounded rumps you could still plainly see the grace and
power of their massive muscles rippling beneath their hides as they walked, dug
at the ground, briefly tussled together a couple of times, and occasionally ran
a short distance. One stood up on its hind legs a time or two to survey the
terrain around them, revealing a white patch on its chest.
Going by their nearly identical appearance and size, maybe
300 pounds or so, and their familiar behavior towards each other, we speculated
that they were siblings and probably three-year-olds who’d been given the boot
by Mama Bear so she could have more cubs.
So, after all was said and done, it was a pretty good day
even though we didn’t even get to see a bighorn. The only thing that really
upset us was seeing a billboard advertising camel
rides along Highway 89 in Paradise
Valley. If the quota remains unfilled, we plan to go back for the last 2-3 days of season.
