August Feature Story: Huntaholics Outdoors is starting a fun new contest each month. We will randomly pick one lucky hunter/huntress to submit a story and photos from a past hunt and in return we will post it on our page and send some swag their way. Our first is an amazing story from 2012. Enjoy! Cheyenne Passeys Sheep Hunt from 2012 _________________________________ My Ultimate Daddy-Daughter Date When my dad asked me if I wanted to go sheep hunting because a buddy of his couldn’t make it last minute, I was overwhelmed and responded with a giant YES! Being only 15 years old I didn’t think I’d get the chance for a long time. I had been hearing his sheep hunting stories for years and so I was super excited to get my chance to go, and being from Alberta I was allowed to just buy a tag. We packed up all our supplies and fit them into the front of our horse trailer. Our supplies included things such as Food, clothes, sleeping bags, tents, etc. It made me more excited as the hours flew by, and before we knew it we had our pack string loaded into the trailer (two riding horses and four pack mules). Our gear we stuffed into pack boxes and set them in the trailer too. On the road we went! Our drive up consisted of McDonald’s every stop so I definitely didn’t complain one bit! It was a long ten hour drive but we conquered it and pulled into the trail head in the mountains about twelve o’clock that night. We fed our animals and tied them up to the trailer then grabbed our sleeping bags and had a short sleep. At about four thirty in the morning we woke up saddled everything, put packs on, tied up our hiking boots, grabbed our day’s snack and set off down the trail. I decided to take my three year old gelding; he loved the previous mountain trip before, so I figured this would be so good for him! Heading down the trail took a long time, but the scenery was absolutely amazing. It never got boring because leading two pack mules with a three year old could get very interesting sometimes! We rode nine hours then found a camp and stopped for the night. My dad and I set up the tent and cooked supper. It consisted of two cans of “Chunky Soup” - the best meal ever after a long ride. As we spotted the mountains around us through our scopes to see if we could find some rams but instead my dad found some ewes eating their supper as well! We spotted for a little while longer, and then pulled out some books we brought and read until it got dark. My sleeping bag was so warm when I jumped in, I fell asleep within seconds. When I woke up there was hail on the ground! My dad said it hailed and thundered so loud, but I heard nothing. Being a deep sleeper helps sometimes. For breakfast, we ate some fruit cups and oatmeal, packed up camp and headed onto the trail again. From the rain the night before the trail had lots of bog and a was very slippery. Our horses and mules were not enjoying it, but we made it out of the mess and our trail began to get better along the way. We passed some guys who were riding out, and we continued on. Six hours later we came to the place that we would make our base camp. Our horses and mules were so excited to be done for the day so we unpacked them, put on their hobbles and turned them out to eat. We then got camp settled in, the wall tent went up easy, saddles were stacked on a rail and we got our kitchen set up. We knew we had a few more hours until sunset so we grabbed two mules and saddled up and went for an hour ride up into small basin. It then began to rain, so my dad and I huddled under some pine trees with our rain slickers covering us like a blanket. We waited for what seemed forever and then it started to snow! I was freezing and was starting to wonder what I got myself into. My dad has been known for some pretty crazy mountain stories so I was beginning to think “Oh no, I’m in one of those!” We jumped back on our horses and decided to save this site for tomorrow. The minute we returned to camp the sun came out. Funny how life works sometimes! We hung all our wet clothes to dry by the fire and I read my book again. After the sun went down, we climbed into our sleeping bags and fell asleep. Cough drops became my best friend because I had a really bad cold, so spotting wasn’t easy the whole trip. My dad told me if I coughed again in a basin like that he would have to kill me and leave me there (I laughed but I don’t think he was kidding). Day three was our first real spotting day. We woke up at five, caught two mules and saddled them. While eating our quick breakfast of fruit cups and oatmeal again I grabbed my binoculars, a couple chocolate bars and stuffed them in my saddle bags. We rode back to the same spot as the previous day and it started to rain again! So we sat and waited a little longer and the sun finally came out and we continued on. Leaving our mules tied up to a couple trees we hiked up and looked at all the beautiful mountains around us, but sadly we didn’t see any beautiful sheep on them. There were huge sheep trails so we spotted them long and hard but couldn’t see a thing. I knew it was hunting and things don’t always work out but I was sad there wasn’t one sheep up there. My dad just simply said, “Let’s head back to camp and spot a different area tomorrow.” He was way more positive than I ever was. He had guided for years and years so he really found joy in this. Me? I wasn’t so sure. Our mules were happy to see us when we walked back towards them and we returned to camp. After unsaddling them, I wanted a shower so bad. I boiled some water, and added some cold creek water and hung the shower bag up. It felt so amazing! My dad got the fire going and I made a sandwich of spam & cheese. Yeah I wanted to gag when my dad brought it out of the pack box and told me to try it. The spam smelt straight up like cat food. I gave in and took a bit and it was actually so good! It soon got dark so we headed in the tent to go to bed. Five o’clock mornings really weren’t my favorite. I so wanted to sleep in, but I knew that option wasn’t available. Dragging myself out of my sleeping back, I put on my layers of warm clothes over top of my long johns. Again we ate a quick breakfast and this time we didn’t use our horses. We were just going to hike. I put my rain gear, lunch and water bottle in my pack and we headed off to our new destination to spot. This was the hardest workout I have ever done in my entire life! It took us two hours to hike up heavily treed mountainside. While we were hiking my dad turned to me and said, “Cheyenne do you know CPR?” I didn’t know CPR so I replied, “No, I have no idea how to do that!” He then explained all the steps on how to do it and then added, “Just in case I have a heart attack.” How comforting was that? Yeah, I pretty much wanted to wash those thoughts out of my mind as fast as I could. On all our hikes my dad filled the time with hundreds of tips to teach me. Things to look for, why we were walking up this side of the mountain, how the thermals work and things like that. Over the years, he has learned a lot. Anyway, the mountain was pretty much straight uphill the whole way and we wanted to hike up and around its corner to see what was behind it. What a magnificent view, it was beautiful! We still hadn’t seen any wildlife until we walked about a half hour further. There sitting up on a grassy mountainside were nine cow elk and a seven point bull elk! My dad, who has guided elk hunters for years, was very happy to see this. We pulled out the video camera (we had done a lot of videoing of the trip) and recorded the spectacular sight. My dad said he could have easily made the Boon and Crockett book! We continued on because we were looking for sheep not elk. We climbed through some more trees and came to a clear viewing of the back side of the mountain the elk were on. All the sudden my dad stopped up short and said, “Holy! There they are!” He pulled out his binoculars and a smile spread across his face instantly. Five legal rams! My heartbeat sped up a million miles an hour. Dad high fived me and was all smiles! “Cheyenne there is definitely two nice shooters in there!” he kept whispering. We pulled out the video camera and videoed them, then we hiked all the way back to camp to go get our back pack tent and sleeping bags. Once we returned to our base camp we ate lunch and packed our back packs. Tomorrow was opening day so we grabbed our tags and guns too. I actually liked hiking that time back up that hard mountain. I knew I had a reward, waiting if we played our cards right. So back up the mountain again with our backpack camp to a high ridge with level spot and pitched our tent. I was so tired, I just laid there in my sleeping bag. It was only seven o clock and it had started to rain, my dad told me he was going to go spot for a bit and I could just stay there and sleep. I definitely took him up on that offer. Turns out while my dad was spotting, he saw a huge grizzly and videotaped it. He mumbled something on camera like, “I better not tell Cheyenne so that she will sleep tonight and will hike tomorrow!” Yeah he never told me and later I found out the next day. He eventually came back to the tent and fell asleep too. We woke up at five in the morning again, and left our tent to start hiking the huge mountain so we would be above the sheep. We climbed to the top and looked down to see another tent down in the valley. My heart was crushed! Who knew where these hunters would be, or if they had even seen the sheep? We continued to hike until we got to some steep shale. The rocks were slipping out from under my dad’s feet and rolling down the mountain. I was terrified. I’m so afraid of heights, so this was a big deal to me. I was trying my hardest to just think about the sheep and not how high we were, but the fear began to take over and I sat down and tears filled my eyes. The thought of me not being able to do what I came to do flooded my brain and I told my dad I couldn’t do it! He was frustrated and disappointed in me, but he kept going to see if he could see the sheep. He climbed up this steep rock ledge and saw the rams eating below! He whispered, “Cheyenne they are right here! Just come on! You won’t fall!” I still wasn’t buying it. So I replied, “I can’t! You just go shoot one and I’ll just wait here!” Yeah, ridiculous I know. He wasn’t buying that either so he hiked back to me and grabbed my hand. Together we hiked up and I felt a lot safer with his help. I got up the rock ledge and just like he said, there they were! We were scoping which one I wanted, and my dad found the lead ram. We watched them for about three minutes and by now it was seven o’clock. All of a sudden one of the rams looked down towards the valley and then they all started to bolt about 75 yards up the mountain. The hunt was fully on! My dad began to say “Cheyenne we have to hurry! I have to shoot that lead ram!” He aimed his 300 short mag and pulled the trigger, hitting the lead ram. He didn’t drop but he was hit hard slowly walked down the hill. All the other rams didn’t know what to do so that’s when I found my ram with my 7mm 08 and shot and dropped him. Finally my dad’s ram dropped and they both started to roll down the mountain and the others took off. It was such a sigh of relief! My dad was so shocked at what had just happened. It was crazy! We hiked down 275 yards to our rams and discovered they were way bigger than we had expected. We took pictures of my dad’s ram first and so I set my gun and pack down. He was a beautiful 12 year old double broomed ram. My dad has been looking for years for one like that. Once we were done we headed down some shale for about 75 yards until we reached my ram, I had left my rifle and pack up at my dad’s sheep. My ram was still kicking its legs a bit so my dad brought his gun down to just give it one more bullet so it wouldn’t roll anymore. I took my pictures with it, still trying to overcome my fear of the shale. He was the prettiest thing I have ever seen. He was 10 or 11 years old and had a beautiful dark cape. He was broomed on one side and a nice long lamb tip on the other. I couldn’t quite grasp the excitement of my shooting yet; I was so overwhelmed with feelings. To make matters worse I looked down the valley and to my shock there was a big blond grizzly coming up towards us! I yelled, “Dad there’s a bear!” My dad doesn’t get scared that easily so he pulled out the video camera to show everyone at home what was happening. He yelled out, “Hey bear! Hey!” It didn’t even faze the bear. It began to jog towards us. My heart was pounding! My dad was yelling louder and louder and the bear wasn’t scared at all it seemed. My dad told me to run and go get my gun. I began to run my hardest up the shale to get to my gun which was 75 yards away. The bear was now loping up the hill and my dad shot a bullet to the side of the bear to see if that would scare it. It didn’t at all! It kept coming until it got about one hundred yards away then it must of smelled us because it turned and ran back down to the valley. I was shaking so bad. I’ve never been that scared in my entire life. My dad walked up to me and told me to be on bear watch while he worked on the rams. So I did just as he said and watched. We took the cape and horns, back straps, tender lions and hinds of both rams. My pack felt so heavy! Just our horns and cape alone were fifty pounds. We decided to hike around the back side of the mountain which took us four hours because we went all the way back to base camp. Hiking through the trees seemed so scary to do with fresh meat so we hiked down the mountain on a river bed. Exhausting, but so worth it! Eventually we made it back to camp and ate some lunch then unloaded our packs. We washed up and changed clothes so we didn’t smell like dead sheep as we headed back up the mountain to get our tent and sleeping bags. The hike took us about two hours and we found our tent and packed up. We climbed the huge mountain again only to find our carcasses both nowhere to be seen, so it was time to head back to camp with our final load. We started a fire and my dad started to take the capes off the head so we could salt them. Our supper that night was basically all the heavy-weight food we could stuff in our hungry stomachs. Every time I would ask my dad what we should make for supper, he would say “whatever’s the heaviest”, I’ve never planned meals because of weight before. Soon afterward we measured our ram’s bases with a piece of twine. My bases were bigger then my dad’s! He wasn’t so happy about that but I sure was and teased him lots about it. My dad doesn’t know this yet, but with me being his daughter and all, it is pretty much my job/dream to shoot a trophy bigger than what is in his collection and I achieved that dream with this sheep. For the night, we tied our horses and mules up to the trees around our horns, meat, and tent. My dad then placed a head lamp that was on flash mode by the meat and horns to hopefully scare anything that tried to visit us. Once all the fun was over we climbed into our sleeping bags and slept one last night. Six o’clock in the morning rolled around and my body was so sore. We managed to climb out of our sleeping bags to go turn the horses out for their breakfast. Packing up the camp and loading up all the horses took us until ten o’clock and then we were on the trail again. The horses really wanted to get back to the trailer so they kept a very steady pace. We didn’t have to worry about bogs because it hadn’t rained the previous day so everything was mostly dry. After riding for eight hours we got to our pre-planned destination that we were to spend the night at but we had several hours of daylight left, so we didn’t stop. We made it back to the truck, six more hours later. My dad walked almost the whole time because his saddle horse blew its front right shoe and he didn’t want to add more weight to it. The pain in my knees was unbearable for me, so I got off my horse and walked as well once and a while. Even though it was midnight when we got to the truck we unsaddled our horses, gave them some hay to eat and we heated up some ‘Mountain House’ for ourselves. Once we finished eating we made sure all the horses were settled and we climbed into our sleeping bags, I couldn’t stop thinking about the experience I had just lived through! This hunting trip has brought my relationship with my dad to a greater level and I really enjoyed spending time with him. It’s an awesome feeling to be out there in the middle of nowhere with a person you know you can count on every step of the way. The trip certainly tested my strength, but with my dad’s encouraging and helpful words, I was able to do everything that needed to be done. I have learned so much on this hunt and have gone places and done things that I have never thought I could before. I loved this trip so much and I look forward to taking my little brother with us on the next one. Thanks Dad for the best daddy-daughter date a girl could ask for!
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 19:10:09 +0000
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