Dall Sheep Hunt in Alaska - The Best Hunt of My Life

[SC Living Outdoors]

- The 60 Mile Ram -

For all of my adult life, I’ve wanted to hunt sheep. I don’t really know why. Even years before my first western hunt, I remember wanting to go after sheep and trying to figure out a way to do it. I didn’t know if it would ever happen, but I kept dreaming.

Then I got a promotion at work, and I began to discuss a sheep trip with my wife in earnest. She gave me the green light, and I began to really research. I’d never spent remotely close to this much on a hunt, and I was going to do my homework. I even researched going to Russia and hunting snow sheep, but with flights, visas, interior flights, gun permits, and import fees, the price began to add up in a big way. My dream had always been to go Dall sheep hunting. It was at the very top of my list, more than I wanted to hunt any other sheep species. Once I did the math, a snow sheep hunt in Russia added up to essentially the same as a Dall sheep hunt in Alaska.

The Dall sheep population in Alaska has been well documented as not doing as well as most of Canada’s, and that made me a little concerned. So when I say I did a lot of research, I mean I did a ton of research. I don’t know how many outfitters I talked to, but it was a lot. Unfortunately, I caught many of them lying to me about success rates and when specific sheep were killed.

I made a pretty good friend in Alaska over the last couple of years. He hunts everything up there and has pretty good luck with sheep as well as the other animals. He helped me research as well by going through the Alaska Game and Fish website. I was able to look at the number of sheep harvested and the units, and when outfitters would send me pictures, I could do a reverse image search and usually find when the sheep was actually killed. It was pretty disappointing that I caught a lot of them being dishonest just to get me to book a hunt.

Finally, after what felt like months, I found an outfitter who was responsive. He didn’t run a big operation, which I was completely cool with. The statistics he was giving me matched up with what I found through my research. I reached out to every single reference on the sheet he sent me, which was 20+ people, and all of them gave positive reviews over the last 4–5 years. I even talked to the people who had hunted with him for other species, and everything was still good.

So, with excitement and nervousness, in the summer of 2025, I sent him a deposit for August 2026.

Time seemed to fly by, as it often does, and August was here before I knew it. I’m not going to lie—it was a lot of pressure. Spending that much money on a hunt isn’t something that I took lightly at all. This could be my only sheep hunt. Maybe not, but maybe so. I wanted to be ready mentally and physically. I needed my gear to be ready. I needed all the I’s to be dotted and all the T’s to be crossed. I didn’t want my body, mind, or gear to fail me. If I was unsuccessful, it wasn’t going to be from a lack of effort.

I arrived at the Greenville airport on August 15 to begin my flight up to Chicago, over to Portland, and then up to Alaska. I had strategically planned to arrive two days early just in case there was a problem with luggage or weather getting into my hunting area. I didn’t want Alaska Airlines losing a bag to cost me any time on my hunt. I was secretly hoping that I might even be able to get flown in a day or so early so that I could get the maximum amount of time hunting as possible.

I landed around 1 a.m. Alaska time. I had booked a truck through Enterprise, and according to their website, I couldn’t pick it up until 6:30 a.m. because of my late arrival. However, two planes had landed about the same time, and all the car rental desks had employees there. Upon retrieving my bags without any issues, I walked up to the Enterprise desk, and the lady was kind enough to let me pick up my truck about five hours early.

I had planned to just sleep in the airport for a few hours until I was able to pick it up, but this was a better option. I got out to my truck and was looking for the closest Walmart where I could go to sleep for five or six hours when I decided I would just stay in the rental airport parking lot. My gun case slid pretty neatly between the rear seat and the front seat, and my inflatable mattress filled up all the gaps. I got my sleeping bag and slept for four or five hours.

When I woke up, I headed over to Walmart anyway to pick up a little bit of food because I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get flown in for a couple of days. I also picked up a fuel canister for my little stove, which I wasn’t sure if I would need or not, but I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Then I was on the road.

That afternoon, I finally met my outfitter in person. He told me he wasn’t sure which guide I would be with yet, but after we talked for a couple of hours, he told me I would be hunting with a guide named Peter. (Peter’s not his real name, but he’s a pretty private guy, so I’m changing it out of respect for him.)

My outfitter told me there might be a window where he could get me in that night, but if not, we would try to go the next morning. However, the high winds were going to make it challenging. I headed out onto some public land for another night in the backseat of the truck because it just felt like a waste of money to pay for a bed when I could easily just sleep in the truck.

 

[SC Living Outdoors]

I got a text message early the next morning from the outfitter saying, “Let’s try it.”

Maybe that should’ve made me nervous, but I was excited, so I got back to the plane and we loaded everything up. I knew the outfitter was very experienced in his plane, but Super Cubs are essentially bathtubs with wings, and I strapped in for what would be maybe the most terrifying forty-ish minutes of my life.

It was blowing 45 miles an hour. Every once in a while, a gust would hit us, which seriously made me clench up, and a good portion of the time, we were flying sideways, it felt like. I am not too proud to say that I was holding on.

But all’s well that ends well, and we landed on a gravel strip just like we had planned, without any damage except for an elevated heart rate.

We unloaded the plane, including the pizza that I had brought to fly in for the guys in camp, which was well received. I met Peter in person, and we went through my gear to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything that was not needed. He and I are about the same age, and we got along great right from the start.

Little did I know that he was one of the most fit mountain hikers on planet Earth, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

After going through my gear, I only removed a couple of very small things (tarp, stove, and fuel), and he told me I didn’t have to take my spotter or rangefinder if I didn’t want to. But those are pretty much staples in my bag, and he was cool with me carrying them.

Often, the way it works at this camp is hunters fly in and then spend the remainder of the day getting everything ready to go in camp. They don’t leave to hunt until the next morning. After all, you can’t fly and hunt on the same day, so that’s normally the plan.

However, because I arrived early that morning and was the first person in camp, we decided to load up our packs and head out that day. Our day zero would just be a hiking day where we could cover a lot of ground and get into sheep country, ready to really start hunting on day one.

I was in camp less than an hour before we headed out.

The first adventure was crossing a river that was too swift to wade, most likely, so they had a small inflatable boat stashed in the bushes, and we used it to cross the river.

I did not know where we were going for the day, but Peter had a basin in mind, so we hiked our way up a creek bed, crossing the creek about 50 different times back and forth as we worked our way in. We saw one small ram and some other ewes and lambs high up on one of the mountains as we hiked in. We also saw lots of moose, caribou, sheep, and wolf tracks in the sand as we continued to hike.

It took us a good portion of the day, but we finally came to where Peter wanted to start hunting. It was 8½ miles from where we had started, and he told me that was the farthest he had ever gone in with a client on the first day. This seemed to make him happy, and it made me feel good that we were able to cover so much ground to start the day.

This was a true backpack hunt. We carried all our gear with us the whole time. At night, we would set up in a specific spot, sometimes right before dark and sometimes just once we reached that area. Then, the next day, we would pack it all up.

Usually on my hunts, I pick an area, backpack in, set up a little spike/base camp for myself, and then hunt an area within two or three miles before moving if needed. This hunt was not like that. If we climbed a mountain, we had our gear. If we went down all the way to the bottom, we had our gear. This allowed us to go wherever we saw sheep and to sleep wherever was necessary.

I did not know it at the time, but the reason we went to this specific area to start the hunt was because, on Peter’s last hunt, they had seen a group of five rams go in this general direction, and one of them looked like it had potential. He wanted to find those five rams and see if one of them was a legal ram.

So that night, we got into the head of that basin, set up our camp, and then Peter said he was going to hike up on top of the ridge and glass. He let me know that it wasn’t necessary for me to come up there if I didn’t want to, and that often hunters would stay at camp to rest their legs while he went up and glassed in the mornings and evenings.

I had made the decision that I was going to give it my all, and that meant going wherever the guide went because two sets of eyes are better than one. I also wanted to try to be the first one up in the morning glassing and stay out glassing until I couldn’t see.

We got up on top of the ridge and immediately found a group of ewes and lambs close by, so we moved out of sight so we wouldn’t spook them and continued to glass.

Before long, one of us spotted five rams way down across the valley in an adjacent basin. I don’t remember which of us spotted them, but while looking with our spotter, we were able to identify them as rams and could even tell that a couple had decent horns from 2.25 miles away.

The plan for the next day was to get back up on the ridge in the morning to make sure the rams were still in the same spot, then go get a closer look to see if any of them were legal.

On this hunt, my goal was to kill a legal ram. I wasn’t holding out for a giant. To me, any double broom/full curl/8-year-old sheep is a trophy that I would be thrilled with.

We headed back down to our camp for the night to eat some food with some positivity going into the next day.

- I’m going to post this story in sections. My goal is to get it all up between today and tomorrow along with pictures. So those of you that don’t like to wait, just come back in a few days and it’ll all be posted. It was a heck of a trip and I want to do the story justice along with posting pictures as they happened.

A pic before I was holding on.

An old cabin while hiking in.

Some ewes and lambs right above camp the first night.

Camp the first night from the ridge.

The 5 rams from over 2 miles away. It was low light.

 

[Mallardsx2]

Very cool so far!!!

We must not live far apart. I fly out of Greenville all the time.

 

[Salmonchaser]

I can’t wait for more

 

[duckhunt]

This is going to be epic.

 

[SC Living Outdoors]

The next morning, I was the first one up, bright and early, and I headed up the ridge to look for those rams. It did not take me very long to locate them. They were still right in the same area they had been in the previous day.

A little while later, after we had packed up camp and eaten breakfast, we began our hike over to get a closer look. The wind was howling that day, which did not make things easy when looking through the glass, but eventually we closed the distance to about 1,500 yards. In between the wind gusts, we were able to get a closer look.

Two rams were close to legal. It looked like one ram was seven years old and short of full curl, while another ram was six or seven and less than an inch away from being full curl.

While we were glassing the rams, I turned around and glassed in the opposite direction and located a small group of caribou with a great bull in it. Unfortunately, I did not have a caribou tag.

We continued our way up to the top of the bowl, where we had decided we would camp for the night and be able to glass the backside of the ridge that looked into multiple different basins.

We were able to get a closer look at the rams again, and none were legal, although those two were close. Right before we got to the top of the bowl, there was a flat area where we could camp for the night. Even though it was only afternoon, we set up our shelters in the wind, and once we had everything secured, we headed up to the rim to start glassing down into the bowls.

We immediately picked up a group of sheep down below us, but there was only one ram, and he was about five years old. We glassed there for a while before moving up to the next bowl, and then the one after that, finding sheep in each bowl.

It wasn’t until the last bowl that I glassed up a good ram. He was broomed on one side and just shy of full curl on the other. Unfortunately, he was 1,200 yards away in an incredibly difficult spot, with not really a way to get closer to him unless you wanted to pop up at an ultra-close range and shoot him.

Peter was teaching me about how to age sheep because I had very minimal experience doing so. The main thing he was looking for to start was the three-year-old growth ring. If you’re able to see the three-year ring and it is around the ear area, odds are the sheep is not eight years old. If the three-year ring is a lot lower, closer to the jaw or lower, your odds of it being a legal sheep by age are a lot higher.

We watched that ram for a long time, but unfortunately, in the end, Peter decided he was not legal, and it was not worth burning an entire day to try to get close to maybe kill a ram that he thought would not check one of the boxes on legality.

The next morning, I was the first one up again, glassing the same areas, but I did not turn up any new sheep. After we ate breakfast, we got up on the high ridge above camp and followed it for a few miles, glassing down into all the bowls that we passed along the way.

We crossed paths with the five rams again that morning at 300 yards. One of them was definitely seven years old, and the other was as close to full curl as I think you can get, but it just did not check the box. We believed he was a six-year-old ram.

We eventually made our way all the way down to the main creek, working our way through some wet tundra and slippery rocks, where we stopped to have lunch. We made a plan to follow the main creek down a mile or so before cutting up another side creek, then climbing a slow tundra rise to a shelf off the side of one of the mountains.

This location would allow us to glass some country that we had not seen yet, including some country where we had seen a handful of sheep the night before that we thought might be rams.

We arrived on that shelf in the afternoon, and it was a great camp location. After setting everything up, we climbed 500 feet above camp to the top of a ridge that would allow us to see an incredible amount of country.

That night, we glassed a lot of sheep, seven of which were rams. Two of them would require a closer look the next day. We went to sleep hopeful that one of them would be a legal ram.

The ram that was broomed on one side.



Caribou shedCaribou I glassed up.

Big Boar Grizzly I glassed up while looking at the small 5yr ram.

Another Caribou.

First moose of the trip.

A couple rams.