OK just got back from several more days, 21 all together so far, in the Pryors. Experienced everything from butt dragging lows to “WOW! There’s a ram!” highs. From ice fog and near zero visibility to sweat dripping off your nose, this really is the desert, heat, all in one week. Still no hero pics but I think things are finally looking up.
The first day this trip I set camp in a steady rain before it really turned off cold, 20º that night. Glassed what I could from the rig till dark and hit the bag hoping it’d get better. Woke up to everything covered with ice, inside and outside the tent. Now one thing you don’t do is go climbing on rocks covered with ice
Fortunately is warmed to the 40’s by noonish.
I was able to locate the ewe bands again and each of them had dink rams hanging around hoping to get lucky. The next two days covering a lot of country and glassing brought no rams till late Wed afternoon. I was about halfway up a steep ridge glassing the really steep cliffs when a ram materialized out of thin air, (really strange how critters can do that
). Twenty minutes of glassing revealed another ram and a couple more I couldn’t tell for sure. It was a mile away a thousand feet above me, looking kinda into the sun and so windy I couldn’t get my spotting scope stabile enough to verify their size. I watched them till almost dark then came down with a plan to be above them at daylight.
The next morning I circled around and came at them from the back side of the ridge. Four hours of hiking and glassing in 45mph winds and wow! wind-chill, revealed no rams. By one or two o’clock I’d had enough and headed back down.
I had spotted a ram chasing ewes on the cliffs above the Lake from above but couldn’t tell what size he was from four miles away so decided to try and find them. After being on the ridge it was plumb balmy down in the low juniper country and a couple miles hiking before it got too late to see good sweated me up pretty good. Despite my best efforts I didn’t find the band I was looking for so it was back to camp again.
I was feeling pretty beat up the next morning and took it easy glassing mostly from the low country again. I eventually located six ewe bands and no bigger rams had joined them yet still. As you can imagine I was feeling pretty low, dirty, (hadn’t gotten enough solar energy to heat my solar shower or enough energy to heat the water on my small stove) beat up, and all around grumpy
by this point. Not to mention really second guessing the little ram the first day of my hunt.
There was a ton of stuff to do at home and I made up my mind to hunt the next morning them pull out for home maybe hitting a few vantage points on the way.
About 2:00 with camp about rolled up another vehicle rolled into the campground, it turned out to be a guy name of Gary, one of the other sheep tag holders. We talked for a while comparing notes and it turns out he’d stumbled onto a five year old range management study that showed locations where the rams summered. It was some pretty obscure areas, surprise huh, where I’d hadn’t thought to search. I’d concentrated mostly on the high country where I would imagine the rams should be. In reality for some reason these sheep like the lower arid desert areas. While it is still probably a hundred square miles of very rugged country with probably only 20some sheep in it we were learning. It was a real learning experience, he’d taken pictures of at least a dozen legal rams. I’d been having visions of die-offs or worse that was telling my common sense there were no more rams left in the district. I only wish this could have happened sooner!! Gary was only hunting for a real monster which he hadn’t found yet, now I’m not so particular so next trip look out
Well I’m back home now and won’t be able to go again for a week but when I get back to sheep country it’ll be with a whole new confidence. I imagine the rut will finally be commencing so after finally learning where the rams have been hiding out for the last several months they will probably be heading for the ewe bands I found. Hopefully it’ll be a whole new ballgame.
This is more the kinda country where the guys have been hanging.
Topic: Pryor Sheep Hunt Update... 11/17/07 (Read 2816 times)
