As I look back on my hunt, I realize that there were dozens of people who played critical roles in my hunt who never were able to spend a day in the field with me.  Some people call this "networking"; I call it "team building".  As I look back at my hunting career, and work career for that matter, I have come to realize the one common factor in any of my accomplishments was the team of contributors.  One contribution at first glance might appear larger than another but every piece was essential to the outcome.  On this hunt I would have too many to list!

 Matt Liljenquist had spent much of August and September scouring one end of my unit looking for a ram for the auction tag holder.  After their hunt was completed he gave me a breakdown of the rams they had seen.  I was very confident that they had taken a good inventory of the rams living on that end so I dedicated myself to find sheep that they had not seen.  I then called Pete Cimellaro. 

Just about everything I know about desert sheep I learned from Pete and his insights as to where sheep will be found are eerily accurate.  Pete told me about a little rock finger that looked into a monstrous canyon called Fish Creek.  His directions were precise.  I hit each landmark exactly when my internal compass expected to and within two hours I was overlooking one of the most spectacular pieces of Arizona terrain south of the Grand Canyon.

Fish Creek was so immense that I stood there in awe for a solid ten minutes trying to decide where I should even start to scour with my Swarovski 15x56's.  I had no doubt that it would take me two hours, or more, just to look it over one time.  It was still 5 days before the opening day of December 1st and I was in no hurry, so I finally took a deep breath and found a comfortable spot out of the relentless wind.  Whenever I take my first look at big country with binoculars, I spend the first 10 minutes "cherry picking" or looking at spots that I think will likely hold game.  After that I will settle in to a grid pattern and methodically look at every square inch of terrain.  At about my third "cherry" spot, I saw what looked like a bighorn rams shadow projected onto a rock face.  In the early morning dawn it took me a while to find the source of the shadow but when I did, it put a big smile on my face.  There stood one of the best looking desert bighorn rams that I had ever seen.  Though he was two miles away I was able to capture some "digiscoping" pictures through my Swarovski STS-80 HD.  After four months of anticipation and tedious deskwork I had finally broken out of the office and found a great ram on my first serious day of scouting. 

The Arizona desert sheep season is the 31 days, the entire month of December - thank God!   Because my weapon of choice was a Mathews Black Max compound bow I knew that it was going to take some time to make the right stalk and get the type of shot I was looking for.  I had just received my Christiansen Arms 300 WSM a few weeks before the hunt so I installed a Swarovski 4-12x50 and sighted it in just in case, but I was dedicated to my bow. So with a few days to go before I could start to carry my bow, I continued to look for a ghost ram that had never been seen. 

As I mentioned my hunt unit was just east of the Phoenix area (Unit 24B).  One of the best and worst parts of being so close is that every hunter I talked to had seen a "big" ram in the last year or two.  I never got tired of hearing the stories and I checked out every lead I could.  Tom Liversedge saddled up his mules one day for a ride into the Superstition Wilderness.  We chased the legendary ghost all day with no luck at all.  I continued to check-in on rams I had seen to see if they had grown in the last five days or if a new ram had appeared out of nowhere!

I finally decided that I really needed to go back and find the first ram I had found in Fish Creek.  I was really hoping to find a better ram in a less ominous location but that was not my destiny.   The word "ominous" did not quite sum up my impression of Fish Creek so I looked in the thesaurus and found: foreboding, dreadful, prophetic, menacing, boding evil, inauspicious, threatening, sinister, and cautionary as viable substitutes.  Believe me, every one of these words could be used to describe this area. 

On the opposite side of "The Creek" from my glassing positions was Horse Mesa and beyond that was Apache Lake.  Horse Mesa was given its name by the US Cavalry, because there was only one trail up onto the mesa (on the opposite end from the sheep, of course) and absolutely no other way for even a horse, much less rider, to get off.  Where this trail topped out there was a pass, not 30 yards wide, which was easily fenced off creating a 25 square mile pasture.  I could only chuckle as I pondered the challenge this presented and was thankful for a 31 day season.

After a couple futile days of morning to dark glassing I decided to hike down to the lake edge and try to look as far around Horse Mesa as possible.  Thanks to the events of September 11th, not only was I not allowed to drive on a perfectly good road, I wasn't even allowed to walk on it once I got to within a mile or so from the damn.  As I reached the bottom I plopped down and threw my binoculars up and there stood a ram, and a big ram I thought.  He was walking away from me and within a few seconds would be out of sight so I did not even try to get the spotting scope out.  The only way to look at that side of the mountain was from a boat on Apache Lake, so I headed home and hit the Internet until I had a boat rented for the next day.