Three Firsts

by Marcus Lunt

unting has primarily been a family endeavor. From the time my siblings and I were old enough, Dad took us out every chance we got. He started us out with grouse and then helped each of us get our first bucks at ages 11 or 12. Every year we would take a 10-14 day long trip to the Kootenay’s in search of elk, mule deer, and whitetail. These trips varied in success but were always a lot of fun and we gained a lot of experience in a short time.

My dad was an adult-onset hunter who started hunting when he was forty and had hunted mostly deer, elk, and moose. In 2020 my siblings and I pressured my fifty eight year old father into going after his first Stone’s Sheep and after a quick five-day hunt, we helped him get his first ram. In 2021 Dad helped me get my first ram on a ball buster of a trip covering around 96km in some steep country over 10 days. This year, 2022, my younger brother Lucas was up to try and get his first ram. We decided to go back to the same area I had gotten mine as we had seen a lot of sheep and knew where a few rams were living. We planned to fly in a week before the season into a lake, hike for two days, roughly 20km away from the lake, and then summit a peak where we could look at two areas where we knew rams like to hang out. The hike in is through a narrow valley that has remnants of a trail but is mostly traversed by bushwacking and crossing a creek frequently to avoid the steep cliffs of the creek’s canyon. We landed at the lake at around three that afternoon and hiked the creek canyon until dark. With a few difficult crossings, we didn’t make it as far as we anticipated. This meant the following day was a long 11 ½ hour hike through some grueling heat. The next day was our first day scouting and after the hike-in, Lucas wasn’t feeling good so he took the day off to recover. My dad, sister, and I would leave the tents at 4 am to hike up into position to look for sheep, my dad and sister would go to a lower ridge to look at our plan A valley at first light and I would summit the main peak to look at our plan B valley, then they would follow me up after a couple of hours. The first part of the morning neither of us spotted any sheep but once my dad and sister joined me at the peak, I found a group of five rams bedded on a sharp spine about five kilometers away, adjacent to our plan B valley. After watching the rams through mirage for about an hour we confirmed the five rams were the group we had expected to be in the plan B valley, one of them being a big heavy ram we had seen the year prior. We glassed around for the next few hours and spotted some ewes and lambs but nothing in our plan A valley. We went back down the mountain and spent the rest of the day at the tents recovering. The following morning Lucas was feeling better and reinvigorated by the news of us spotting rams. We ran the same program with me ascending the peak myself and the other three making the pit stop to glass the plan A valley at first light. About 30min after the sun hit the ridge the 5 rams were on the previous day, I spotted them making their way back to their little perch, perfect, they haven’t gone anywhere. After spotting them I turned my gaze over to the plan A valley and started gridding out the cliffs with the spotting scope. As the sun got higher it continually revealed more and more of the hidden folds of rock. As the sun was about halfway across this particular set of cliffs, I saw what appeared to be a horn shining above a rock shelf. I dialed the spotting scope to 60x and focused on the suspected object. After a couple of minutes of intent staring, the object moved and I could now clearly see two horns of a ram looking directly away from me. A few minutes later the others reached the top of the peak, so I moved over to them and informed them of my discovery. We could tell the bedded ram was of good size based on the amount of horn mass he carried at his bases as well as out toward the end of his curl. After about 30 min the ram got up and started feeding, allowing us a better look as he gave us all the right angles. He was a nice heavy ram, but his horn length was a couple of inches short of being full curl. Being too far away to count horn annuli we chalked it up to probably being a 7-year-old and decided to put him in our back pocket until later, back to glassing. About an hour later we were sitting looking toward the group of 5 rams discussing the best way to approach them when my dad suddenly said, “Ram right there… Big ram right there!”.

We all snapped our heads up and looked toward where he was pointing. About 500 yards away on an adjacent peak, we could see a ram walking out to a bench along the edge of the peak. We quickly trained the spotting scopes on the ram and immediately saw he was what some people call a “no-brainer” ram, a ram whose horns extend well beyond the bridge of the nose. We watched in awe as the ram worked his way to the shelf and bedded down facing away from us. We watched the ram for a few minutes, got some quick footage, and then snuck away down the ridge out of sight. I couldn’t believe what we had just seen, and we all expressed the encounter with one word, luck. Luckily we had seen the ram and lucky he was so close to camp but we also knew that there was a lot of work ahead of us if we were going to get a chance at him. We snuck down the mountain back to camp and decided we weren’t going to summit the peak again until opening day in fear of spooking the ram. Up until this point, the weather had been exceptionally nice with sun every day but that was about to change. That night a large lightning storm rolled in and rained all night and well into the next morning. The forecast for the next week was all rain except for possibly opening day which called for mostly clouds but no major precipitation. We spent the day in the tents until the evening when the clouds lifted for a couple of hours and we got out to glass the ridgeline above us, then back into the tents for the night when the rain picked back up. The next morning was socked in and raining until the afternoon when it broke again for a couple of hours. We decided to sneak to a nearby point to get a better angle on a ridge coming down off the peak, thinking that the storm could have pushed some sheep off the top into our bowl. As soon as we got into position my sister spotted a sheep skyline on the ridge… it was him. The big ram was bedded right on a little tabletop rock that overlooked the bowl, luckily, we were far enough below him and didn’t expose ourselves so he hadn’t seen us. We spent a couple hours watching and filming the ram until he got up and made his way back up to the top and out of sight. We were all excited we had seen the ram again and were confident he wouldn’t be too far come opening day. The next couple of days were filled with a lot of rain and cloud cover, it did break once, and we saw a group of ewes and a 7-yearold ram bedded 800yrds right above camp. The opening day my brother and I made a plan to start hiking at 3:30 am up a ridge that would lead us to the peak we had seen the big ram on. We got up a 3 am to check on the weather and we awoke to relatively clear skies with some clouds laying in the valley bottom, so we decided to get after it and start our ascent. We hiked up the valley a little way and then slowly started hiking up our ridge, glassing our way up making sure he or any other sheep weren’t in our way. About 4 hours later we were at the top of the main ridge leading to the peak but the clouds that were in the valley bottom were now rolling up and over the mountains blocking our view. We waited patiently for the clouds to lift and once they did, we started glassing the bowl on the left side of the peak. We immediately spotted 6 rams bedded in the rocks and scrambled to get the spotter on them. With clouds rolling in and out it took us a while but determined that the big ram was not among them and packed up to continue to the peak to look into the bowl on the right side of the peak. We moved slowly, stopping when the clouds were thick and then advancing as they lifted hoping we’d spot the ram before he spotted us. Suddenly we could see a large gap in the clouds coming and knew we’d have lots of time to sneak down the peak into the bowl with unobstructed vision. We made our way to where we had first spotted the ram bedded in a series of rock benches, but no ram. With lots of the bowl still hidden from our view, we continued down the ridge, Lucas leading just in case we jumped the ram and me on his heels. Picking our way down Lucas would stop constantly to look through his binoculars

at suspicious objects. This happened several times until he hit the ground, turned to me, and said, “I see a ram bedded down there”. Excited he explained to me where he had seen it, I slowly rose scanning the area until I suddenly saw a ram’s head behind a large rock. I immediately knew it was the big ram as his horns were reaching for the sky. I looked at Luke and said, “it’s him, he’s behind a big rock”. Lucas informed me the one he saw was bedded in the open and after a little more investigating we discovered there were 2 other rams with the big guy. We ranged where the rams were bedded and the distance was 450 yards, a little bit outside our comfortable shooting distance. We could see a route to our left that would get us another 50 yards and possibly closer, so we started our stalk down the rocks. We made it about 50yrds and then the rocks began to get increasingly unstable, so we moved back onto the ridge but were now in sight of the rams. Lucas could see one of the rams had gotten up and was feeding. I spotted several big rocks to our right and told Luke to crawl over to them and see if he was comfortable shooting from there. While he moved to the rocks the other two rams got up and fed towards us and out of sight. I then moved to Lucas and tried to help him get set up on the rocks for a shot. Using one of our packs and a jacket Lucas got the gun wedged between the rocks and leaned back on the pack, instructing me he was solid. By the time Lucas got set, the rams had popped back out to the right and were slowly feeding and working their way across the slope below us. I got the spotter set up and then ranged the rams, 400 yards, Luke dialed his turret and got steady. The big ram was standing behind a big rock and Luke told me once he walked out and stops, he was going to take the shot. The ram walked out from behind the rock about 50 yards, stops, and... boom, the ram spun around, ran 75 yards, and fell over, perfect shot. We proceeded to high five, hugged, and were both in disbelief of the events that just occurred. We sat and watched the other two rams slowly walk off down into the bowl and messaged Dad and Adrianna what had just happened. They said they had heard a boom but had assumed it was rocks rolling and couldn’t believe we had the ram. Luke and I waited on the ridge while Dad and Adrianna hiked up to meet us. We told them the whole story and re-enacted the shot for them. We then made our way down to the ram together, took lots of photos, and got to work field dressing and butchering the ram. We split the weight between the 4 of us and started our hike back to camp, taking an easier route back down the mountain where we could ski the scree all the way down to the bottom. We got back to camp in good time, hung the meat, finished caping the skull, and salted the cape. The next morning, we broke camp and started our trek back to the lake. We made it almost back to our first camp on the way in but had noticed that

the creek had gone up considerably since we came in and it was still raining so we knew we wouldn’t be able to make some of the crossings on the next part of the hike. We reviewed the maps that night and devised a plan to hike up and around the worst part of the creek. That next morning, we started the day off with an ice-cold creek crossing that made us all wince and groan with pain. It rained most of the day, but we made decent time and got to the lake at around 3:30 pm. Due to weather, we ended up flying out the following day at 7:00 pm, concluding our epic adventure. Some people could look at our success and think maybe we are just skilled hunters, but I can promise you the areas we have been in are more to thank than our skills as hunters. Three rams in three years is a direct reflection of the opportunity and quality of some of the areas here in BC and with some physical effort to get into these areas anyone can find success. If a 60-year-old man and three kids can make it happen, anyone can.