I Nearly Died Trying to Recover My Bighorn Ram, But I Couldn’t Leave Him on the Mountain

This story “Cliffhanger Ram,” appeared in the August 1990 issue of Outdoor Life.

The ledge threading across the face of the cliff had become so narrow that I couldn’t bring one leg around the other to take a step. The ledge was no longer level, either. It sloped downward. I scooted my right foot forward, feeling for solid footing, not daring to look down. I had once and nearly had frozen at the sight of treetops hundreds of feet below. My boot seemed to be gripping, so I hugged the cliff and dragged my left foot up behind the right.

Mountain climbing is not my thing. I don’t even like to watch it on TV. I was raised in Springfield, Illinois, where it would be easy to imagine that the entire world is flat. But what concerned me at this moment was not having mountain boots with Vibram soles. I was wearing insulated rubber boots designed more for mud than rock.

It was a mistake for me to be on this ledge, of course. And it wasn’t the first I had made that day. But it was too late to worry, and there was no time for regrets. A bighorn sheep that I had wounded was somewhere ahead of me on this ledge. I had a responsibility to fulfill, and I was determined to carry it out.

This ram — the entire hunt, in fact­ — had been a cliffhanger from the very start. In Wyoming, sheep permits are distributed by means of a lottery-type luck of the draw. I had applied for four years before my name was selected. I applauded my luck, until, that is, I got to the ledge.

I hunted the Absaroka Mountains of the Shoshone National Forest in northwestern Wyoming for most of the two-month season without seeing a ram with a legal three-quarters curl. Finally, I got a fleeting glimpse of a band of five good rams on a dead run across the head of a canyon. There was no sense following. It was almost dusk, and they had seen me first. I returned to hunt these rams.

Earlier in the day, my younger brother Walt, 28, and I, 34, had climbed the Ishawooa Mesa trail on horseback. At daybreak, we began glassing the cliffs, canyons and grassy meadows of the large ridge. It was October 29, and the season would end on October 31. I was becoming very nervous about the small amount of time left. Once you have drawn a permit in Wyoming, you’re not eligible to apply again for another five years. Add five years for unpredictable lottery luck, and it’s easy to see that a Wyoming bighorn sheep permit can be a once-in-a-lifetime affair. I didn’t want my one opportunity to end in failure.

At last, about 2 p.m., I peered over a ledge into a huge rocky bowl and spotted a young ram 200 yards below. My blood rushed while I continued glassing, look­ing for a legal ram that I knew should be nearby. Suddenly, there he was, bedded down on the lower side of a massive chimney rock. His brown coat had blended perfectly with the rocks, making him difficult to see.

All that remained now was to place my shot. I forced myself into deliberate calm. My perhaps once-in-a-lifetime hunt was reaching its finale, and it all had to be done. To reduce the chance of a flubbed opportunity, I was certain to test fire the new scope on my .308 on each trip to the mountain.

The ram was facing mostly away, but at a slight angle, and I was looking down on his back. Where should I place the bullet? Where will it come out? What will it hit on the way? Am I sure of the range? How much will the bullet drop? How much should I compensate for shooting mostly straight down?

For a full 30 minutes, Walt and I quietly sized up the ram and planned the shot. When I squeezed off the round, both sheep van­ished behind the chimney rock. I felt confi­dent that my shot was well-placed, but just to be sure, Walt remained above to act as spot­ter. He would yell if he saw my ram move.

I worked my way down slide rock, timber and patches of snow. It was slow going. The “what-ifs” started popping into my mind. The longer it took, the greater my anxiety built. After what must have been a half-hour after the shot — time enough for a badly wounded animal to stiffen up — I found a trail of blood where the ram had bolted out of its bed. The dead bighorn had to be nearby.

“Walt,” I yelled in relief, “blood!”

Rocks clattered in a shallow draw just 30 yards below me. The ram! Perhaps not hit as hard as I hoped, it hadn’t stiffened and was now moving again. Yelling to Walt had been a serious mistake. If I had quietly followed the blood trail, I might have finished the ram where he lay.

I hurried down and caught sight of the ram. I shot and missed. I lost sight of him in the trees. Then he reappeared walking broadside to me just across a little draw. Again, I shot and missed. Suddenly, he de­cided to lie down right there in sight of me, and still I couldn’t hit him. About then, I discovered that the rear mount of my new scope had loosened, perhaps when I fell on the way down. There were two cartridges left.

I followed the ram downhill, thinking that I was “walking him home” toward our rigs parked far below near the South Fork of the Shoshone River. Slowly, however, it began to dawn on me that this animal had an escape plan. I saw him turn left around some large rocks and head across the slope toward a stand of conifers. He was just inside the trees going straight away when he stopped and gazed to his right — completely unaware of my presence only 30 yards behind him. With the scope loose, I had to simply try a shot and hope for the best. The rifle roared, and the ram collapsed like a dynamited building.

I was elated. At last I had put an end to my bighorn sheep hunt with a fine trophy head and meat for the freezer. I faced Walt’s position above me and cut loose with a vic­tory whoop that echoed all over the canyon. Then I returned my attention to the ram.

I couldn’t believe it. He jumped up and ran. I had done it again. Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut?

The trees ended at the beginning of a ledge across the face of a cliff that I didn’t even know was there. The sheep could have gone nowhere else, so I followed.

The ledge was a decently wide and flat enough shelf at first. It narrowed to a dead­ end rock abutment. Growing from below the abutment, and leaning away from the cliff at a 30°angle, was a pine tree about 18 inches in diameter. It was only six inches from the ledge, so the sheep must have somehow climbed the rock. It’s remarkable what sheep can do with hooves that grip with clefts and hard edges and cling with the soft, almost adhesive inner pads. I couldn’t possibly du­ plicate its climb over the abutment.

There was only one way I could go on. I weighed the idea against a failed hunt and was sorely tempted to quit. But as a hunter, I knew that my responsibility was to do eve­rything in my power to recover the animal. I prayed for help, then wrapped my arms around the tree and bellied around the trunk with my backside hanging over the cliff.

Conditions only got worse from there on. The ledge became so narrow that I had to scoot along, and its slope threatened to slide me off into oblivion.

Again, I considered quitting. Another rock, probably 6 1/2-feet tall, jutted out from the cliff and blocked the ledge. Beyond the rock, the cliff face curved out to the right, allowing me to see the ledge. It tapered off to nothing, so I figured that the sheep must have fallen. Or he could be out of sight just beyond the rock. Then I saw blood atop the rock.

There was a tiny dent in the rock for a toe­ hold, and I was able to hoist head, shoulders and gun over the top. I clung there by the weight of my belly and chest against the rock and stared into the face of the surprised sheep. He stood up not 10 feet away. It was so close I just pointed the rifle and pulled the trigger on my last cartridge.

The sheep disappeared from the ledge. Moments later I heard a thud far below, then two more thuds. With my compact binocu­lars I spotted the dead ram approximately 500 feet below me.

There was no way down the cliff to the ram, so I slowly edged my way back off the ledge and began the climb back up to Walt. It was grueling. Fine talus that I had slid down easily was now causing me to slip backward a step for most of the steps I took forward. Nearby, bighorn ewes stared at me along the way, apparently unintimidated because of my near-helpless maneuverability.

Two hours later, I made it to the ridgetop trail. I was exhausted. Daylight was all but gone. But worse, I found that the conse­quences of my premature victory whoop were not yet concluded. Walt was gone. He took my yell to mean that I had the ram and would continue on down to the rigs. He got the horses and rode down to wait for me.

I started down the trail, but daylight was quickly slipping away. The edge of a snow front was moving in. Temperatures were dropping rapidly. I hurried to gather enough firewood before complete darkness. It had been a sunny, rather balmy day with low humidity and temperatures in the 50s. I was wearing only blue jeans, a denim jacket with a light polyester vest beneath, and a cowboy hat. With my back to a tree to break some of the wind, I built the fire in a ring of rocks almost in my lap.

In the meantime, Walt was near panic from worrying. At midnight, he drove out to a phone. Tired and confused, Walt was with­ out words to express his fears when my wife, Connie, answered. He simply blurted, “Where’s Steve?” We’ll never fully grasp what two simple words such as those can do to a just-awakened woman in the middle of the night, but Connie had the presence of mind to call our pastor. He convinced her that I was levelheaded and would do the right things to make it through the night.

Walt wasn’t quite that sure. He feared I may have fallen off a cliff. He came back with a friend of ours, plus some search and rescue people. They glassed the mountain for a fire, saw none, and suspected that I was already dead. There was nothing they could do ex­cept wait for daylight.

For one anxious moment that night, my own confidence wavered as well. The wind was terribly cold, snow was starting to fall, I was becoming damp and so was the wood I depended upon for survival. More than cold made me shudder. I thought, “What if I hadn’t had matches? What if the wood had been wet? What if the wood becomes so wet I can’t keep it burning?” After about two minutes of that, I decided it would be wiser to forget the pessimism and think about ways to stay alive.

Around 2 a.m., I heard grunting in the timber below me. I was working as a staff biologist for the Cody Resource Area Office, Bureau of Land Management, at the time and was aware of at least three different sightings of one to three grizzlies in the vicin­ity. I threw more wood on the fire. My rifle was empty.

Few things have been as welcome as the first crack of dawn that morning. I hadn’t slept a wink. I was stiff from leaning tightly against the tree. My backside felt nearly fro­zen, and my front was cherry red from the fire. I immediately put out the fire and started down the mountain. As I broke into the sage foothills 1 1/2 hours later, I saw Walt and two search-and-rescue people coming on horseback. A red plane soared low as one of the horsemen radioed the pilot to abort the mission. I had been sighted.

Walt tried to apologize for leaving that night, but staying wouldn’t have helped. He couldn’t have gotten back up the mountain to me in the dark. The right decision was going for professional search-and-rescue help.

I went home and spent the rest of the day getting warm and resting in bed. The shivers and shakes had continued all night, and al­ though I had experienced no mental confu­sion, I had surely been on the verge of hy­pothermia.

Walt and a friend hiked into the cliffs that day, but they couldn’t reach the ram. The following morning we tried to come up from below the ram on horseback. I was able to identify where the bighorn was by the box canyon it lay above. As we glassed the area we could see ravens, magpies and an eagle dining on my kill. We were within 120 feet, but it was straight up a vertical rock wall.

On Sunday, a young mountain climber volunteered to scale the cliff. I was “belay­ing” — hanging onto the rope he passed through each pin he set, in case he fell. I was relieved when he gave up, exhausted.

I returned to work on Monday, and by Tuesday morning, two more climbers of­fered to go up the mountain and try to sal­vage my ram. They started too late, and it was more than they had bargained for. At 80 feet up, and within 40 feet of my sheep, they had to call it quits in the waning daylight.

All hopes of edible meat were now gone, but I couldn’t get the sheep out of my mind. I don’t kill an animal just to see it die. This sheep had given its life, and it seemed dishon­orable to let the whole animal rot into noth­ing.

A helicopter pilot offered to solve my problem. I was involved in BLM permitting for seismography, and he had heard my story.

“I’m flying up the South Fork every day, anyway,” he said. “In a couple minutes, I could drop you in, pick up the horns, and be gone.”

I was elated. But not for long. The pilot’s common-sense solution bogged down in bureaucratic nit-picking. Was the ram possi­bly a few feet over the imaginary (and inaccu­rate) “wilderness” line that the pilots were supposed to avoid? Would the pilot’s super­visor authorize such a two minute pause? Would the supervisor talk to his supervisor? The bureaucratic chain of command being harder to scale than the 120-foot cliff, I gave it up.

Winter weighed heavily. Three times I drove 25 miles up the South Fork of the Shoshone River to sit and look at the cliffs where my ram lay. Once, Connie went along. Seeing the terrain did not help her under­stand my tenacity. In fact, her concern and determination to keep me away from the cliffs became almost as strong as my own determination to retrieve those horns.

In March, Mark De Forneaux, one of the climbers who got within 40 feet, offered to try again. This time it would be with ice climbing equipment. Unfortunately, an early spring thaw had made the ice unstable.

By the summer, Cody pilot Ed Chis­tensen suggested that we fly over the mesa, shoot pictures, then study them for a plan of attack. No new routes of access were appar­ent from the air, but for weeks I studied photographs and topography maps for a clue. One possibility suggested itself. The opposite end of the cliff with the ledge could be closely approached by horseback, and we’d be very near the site where my ram fell. What lay between that approach and the sheep was anybody’s guess.

Lee Gaskill, Jake Woobert and Loren Bales agreed to explore the possibility. Loren provided the horses and stock truck. We rode up the mesa and discovered my little rock-rimmed fire site built right on the trail. Loren stepped off and kicked it out of the way. I felt strange about that. This was the site of a life and death experience for me. The rocks were like a monument. Part of me was thinking that he should have asked first, and the other part was chuckling at Loren booting my historical marker out of the way for his horses.

After tying off our horses, we descended to the rim of a canyon which overlooked the kill site. The carcass was below us on the opposite side of the canyon. Again, we took pictures so that we could formulate a plan of descent. As I looked across the canyon cliff, no trace of the ledge could be seen where I had followed the sheep. I broke out in a clammy sweat and began to understand Connie’s strong opposition every time I re­turned to the mesa.

Two weeks later, the four of us were back with two 25-foot rope/wood ladders, two 25-foot aluminum-chain ladders, and all of the ropes of various sizes and lengths that we could scrounge together. I resolved that this would be my last try. I couldn’t ask any more of either my friends or Connie.

We tied the horses and descended a steep watershed to a 60° slope in the rock above a hole of unknown depth. It wasn’t a full 360° hole, but the rim circled around for more than 180°. Below the edge, the rock cut back, creating an overhang that prevented us from seeing the bottom.

We tied two ladders in tandem, secured one end to a boulder, and dropped the other down the 60° slope and over the edge. It hung in midair, making no noises to suggest contact with the bottom. We pulled it up and added a third length. Again, we heard no contact with the bottom.

Temperatures began to fall. A front was moving in, and rain began to drizzle. The rocks felt slick. I was on the verge of giving up once again. The ladders had never been tested, and I had no intention of adding a fourth one. Suddenly, someone moved the ladder and yelled, “Hey, I think we hit bot­tom.”

One of the fellows immediately tied a safety rope to his waist and started down the ladder. He hesitated on the last rung before the ladder dropped over the edge into mid­ air. Ten minutes later, despite our urging and encouragement, he crawled back up and removed the safety rope. Three pairs of eyes and no words now told me: “Your sheep; you go get it.”

I hesitated. I did not want to dangle on a rope ladder. But this was my last chance to finish this hunt that had now gone on for 10 months. “Okay,” I finally said, making my excuses in advance, “but we’ll just have to see whether I go over the edge or come back up like he did.”

With a pack on my back and rope wound all over me, I forced myself to go over the edge onto that swaying ladder. Carefully, slowly, I climbed down with white-knuckle grips that didn’t relax until I got to within 10 feet of the bottom and felt my blood flowing again. I was just able to reach solid ground when hanging onto the last rung.

Hoping to traverse around the head of the box canyon to where the bighorn lay, I started down a narrow chute about 200 yards long. Two ropes were left dangling where I half rappelled, half slid down 10- to 12-foot drop-offs. At the bottom, my hopes rose. Off to my right, it appeared possible to walk around the head of the box canyon to a point above the ram. Down another chute, 100 yards lower and the last two ropes left on another pair of drop-offs, and I finally spot­ tedthe white scattered remains of my sheep. I turned over the largest mass, and there lay the skull, horns intact!

As I began to load the skull into my backpack, one horn slipped off. It stank, but this trophy that had been a cliffhanger for 10 months was now mine. Or, it could be — if I got back out. Above me remained a quarter­ mile of 45° climbing, a talus slope, four roped drop-offs, and 75 feet of swaying ladder. My arms and legs – especially the thighs – were already aching.

The talus was fine, about like coarse gravel. Coming down it was mostly a matter of controlling my slide. Going up was awful. With every step my foot would slide almost back to where it had started. I inched my way up, wet and cold from the light rain.

Half-way up the talus, my thighs cramped and locked. I couldn’t move them. And I was afraid to move anything else in an effort to relieve the cramps. If I moved, I’d slide. My only hope now seemed to be rescue from above. To my amazement, after a few quiet minutes, the cramps left. I was able to go on.

Arriving at the bottom of the ladder was a mixed blessing. I was almost home. But I still had that swaying climb. I sent the back­ pack and other gear up on the safety rope. When it returned, I tied it around my waist and started up myself. The higher I climbed, the tighter I tensed, and the more my already weakened strength ebbed.

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I could hardly move when I reached the place where the ladder dropped over the edge. It was all I could do to hang on. I also hadn’t noticed on the way down that one sliding oak rung had hung up on the rock rim. Instead of resting on the knots as it should, it left a two-foot gap between rungs. I was so weak, I stood there, unable to raise a leg that high.

I hollered to my three friends, who heaved as one on the safety rope and hauled me up those two feet and over the edge. The feeling of solid rock under my belly at that moment was something I’ll never be able to adequately describe. The long hunt — a once­ in-a-lifetime adventure that I could handle only once — was finally over. The ram’s horns will have a place of honor in my home as long as I live, and the memory shall linger forever.