twolung2

The story.... Well lets start with he only had one bonus point (the hunter ed point). I put in for him this year for the first time in a long time and didn't even bother telling him. When he was drawn we were shocked. As Smitty pointed out in his post the G&F team was incredibly helpful, the sent survey maps and photos of the rams in the area. It turn out to an additionally exciting because my great grand parents had homesteaded in the area in the 1920s and my father had spent a lot of time there when he was growing up. Scouting was more difficult than we planned but my dad wanted to do this on our own. We had gone out 4 weekend before we saw anything. We glassed all of the north rim with the help of several long time hunting buddies and no luck. Just before Thanksgiving we finally saw two groups of sheep a heard of ewes and three rams all on Brandenburg Mt. One of these rams Smitty harvested opening morning and on the third day my father's. From what I have gathered from the G&F the lions have put the hurt on this herd they have killed 28 lions in the area over the past year. We stayed at our friend place Aravaipa Canyon Ranch across from Brandenburg. On the Tuesday before the hunt we saw the rams again from camp and again the night before the hunt. We decided we did not want to tag out the opening morning and take some time to check out the area one more time to make sure there wasn't a toad lurking in one of the many smaller canyons. When we got back to camp that afternoon we heard Smitty had tagged out. We decided to split up the in two groups one to find the rams again and the other to glass the canyons one last time on Sunday. Needless to say we did find any thing else. We found the rams on Brandenburg not 500 yards from where Smitty had taken this Sunday afternoon and decided we would make a move on Monday. The day started out early by 8am we found them in the same place and watched them til 10am. They are an interesting animal they just seem to wander the mountain. So when we determined they were going to keep heading south we started the hike (Cliff my dad, Me and Jarrod). My father is going on 72 so we had to take our time moving up the mountain, the ground is a loose and much more steep than you would think up there. Around 11:45 we had move to within 200 yards. (see the pic above on a rock out crop). My dads is the one bedded, they must have watched us make the climb and seem to be curious. With all the vegetation it hard to get a clear line of site to shoot from if we where hunting coues they would have been long gone. We finally got a good shooting platform setup and waited for him to stand. After about 45 minutes the ram stood and gave him a nice broadside shot. My dad was using a Tikka T3 30-06 I won this summer at SCI. My friend Patrick was watching though his spotting scope from camp and saw the hit. "He's hit hard he radioed to us". They ram dropped out of site and we waited to get confirmation if he was down. After a few minutes we hear the ram had fallen into a crevice. It took another hour to get to the ram and another to get the ram down to where we took the photos. It was 5pm when we walked into camp pack my dad's first trophy. A would have to say this tops my hunting experiences along with my taking my son hunting cow elk for the first time. There is nothing like hunting with family and seeing them be successful. Being with good friends even more so.

My Dad's sheep. I could not be more happy for him, and thanks for me friends, Jarrod, Patrick and Sky for helping us out. Green score by the G&F 171

Great Ram what did he end up scoring?