I’ve been hunting my entire life, minus the years before I could walk. My older brothers, VJ and Gary, got stuck taking care of me from an early age, so they took me hunting. Where we lived, we could walk out the back door and get after pheasants. When I learned to read, I went straight for the stacks of Outdoor Life and Sports Afield in their bedrooms. Jack O’Connor and those guys were writing about wild sheep in the high country. I dreamed that one day I’d do that.
It’s funny how that works. What we think about becomes our reality. Thoughts become action. I didn’t know what I’d be when I grew up, but I knew it would be something that let me live the way I wanted to live. This past March, at 71 years old, I walked up on a Sonoran desert bighorn and completed my Grand Slam of North American wild sheep.
Why Sheep?
People ask what makes sheep hunting different, and for me, it starts with the glassing. I love sitting on a mountain with good optics and a cup of coffee, picking apart country with the guides and spotters. You don’t have to be quiet in a deer blind back home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s social. You find a ram a long way off and then stalk in. It’s a style of hunting we don’t do much in the Midwest.
It’s demanding, no question. Physically, mentally, emotionally. You go days without seeing anything and start wondering if you’ll ever get a chance to pull the trigger. But I stay in sheep shape. I eat well, I hike, I work out every day, and I can outwalk most guys half my age. It’s a lot easier to stay in shape than to get out of it and try to climb back in.
20 Years in the Making
The slam took me about 20 years. The Dall came first, like it does for most guys. Eric Pawlak at WTA set me up on that hunt, and I’ll never forget seeing my first wild ram from miles away and knowing I had to go get him. It was magical and it was tough…and I was hooked.
After the Dall and the Stone were on my wall, I got particular. I hunted Alberta twice, where a ram only has to be ¾ curl to be legal. I passed legal rams on both trips, waiting for a sheep that was the right size. I had three bighorn hunts that were total busts before I ever filled a bighorn tag. And I was fine with all of it. Killing an animal is the climax of a hunt, but it’s not the whole deal. Everything that leads up to it, the planning included, is as fulfilling as the kill, if not more so.
One of those empty-handed Alberta trips is still a highlight of my hunting life. I got to share a camp with Bobby Turner, a guide I’d read about in Outdoor Life as a kid, back when he was hunting with Jack O’Connor in the ’50s and ’60s, and sheep hunting was nothing but a dream to me. Bobby couldn’t climb anymore, so his son guided me while Bobby helped run camp, and I spent my evenings listening to stories about the same mountains we were hunting. We never killed a ram. It didn’t matter.
The Call that Changed Everything
I’ve been a WTA TAGS client for roughly 25 years, and the system is simple. You build a long-term strategy, put in everywhere you should, and WTA handles the applications and deadlines. It’s nice because you never miss anything. Then you wait, and you don’t quit, because somebody is drawing those tags every year.
For me, it came together on a drive to Newberry, about an hour and a half east of where I live in Marquette. Eric’s name came up on my phone. A call from Eric usually means something good. “Are you sitting down?” he asked. “You just drew a sheep tag!” It was the Montana Rocky Mountain bighorn in the Missouri Breaks, my 21st year applying. I had to pull off the side of the road. I smiled from that day in June until the day I shot the ram. Honestly, I’m still smiling.
That left one sheep. Most guys end up buying their desert bighorn hunt rather than waiting on another draw, and that’s what I did. I called Eric and told him I was ready to talk about desert sheep. He pointed me to an outfitter whose last six WTA TAGS hunters had all tagged out. That’s the other thing about these guys. When Eric says, “I know this outfitter, this is who you go with,” that carries a lot more weight than somebody saying they’ve heard a guy is good. I’ve learned that lesson over the years, and his recommendations have never let me down. He knows the operations firsthand.
The Final Ram
I never go into a hunt expecting to kill something. I learned that the hard way as a young man, and ever since, I enjoy the moments and the people. If I kill something, great. If I don’t, I get to do it all over again.
Sonora tested that. It was over 100 degrees one day and in the 90s the rest. That’s hot anywhere. We spotted two big rams on the second day and spent the next three days trying to get on them. We never saw them again. But there was another ram we’d seen early in the hunt, and when we circled back to his country, he was still there. We got on him fairly quickly, and I killed him at about a hundred yards. I didn’t even have to crank the scope up.
Walking up to him was like a dream. Everything went quiet. The rest was a blur. The guys were slapping my back and setting up pictures. Had I been alone, I could have sat with that ram for an hour and been perfectly content.
The Grand Slam is a huge deal to me. It’s part of who I am now. And I’m not done. I’ve got four animals left for the North American 29, and I’m already looking at hunts with WTA.
Just Do It
If you’re dreaming about sheep, here’s my advice: just do it. Don’t wait, and don’t worry about the money, because we make as much money as we need, and it has a way of coming together. Put in for the tags every single year, even when you go years without drawing, because somebody’s drawing them. Take your advice from people who are smarter than you and have actually been there, like WTA. Stay in shape and have a purpose.
I consider myself lucky to have drawn the tags and lucky to have hooked up with Eric and the WTA TAGS team. These guys have kept me in every drawing I should have been in for 25 years and put me with outfitters who gave me a real chance. They make sure that when your number comes up, you’re ready, and after a quarter century with them, I wouldn’t think of going anywhere else.
