Bow hunting snow sheep

Mountain Range: Kolyma Mt
Area: Magadán / Kolyma
Altitude: 1501 - 2000
Organizer: Personal friend

Pedro Ampuero

Transport: 2.5-hour helicopter ride from Magadan to base camp, plus another 45 minutes to the hunting camp. Expensive, but I believe those extra hours took us to an area better than the usual spots. Density: Moderate, but significantly higher than my previous experiences hunting rams in Russia. Quality: Good. We saw a few mature rams, but nothing exceptional. The one I harvested was clearly the best we saw: an 11-year-old and a magnificent ram. Terrain: Typical sheep country, though in many places it resembled goat terrain. Not excessively high, but steep and tough. Thanks to the good weather, the rams were high up—often above the grass line and near the summits. From some vantage points, it felt like you could see half of Russia. Camp: Tents. We set up two camps: five days in the first area and four in the second. The hunt: I missed a ram in the first area. After working the main groups in that range, we moved to a different area. On day eight of nine—after spending the entire day trying to approach the same group—I managed to get within five meters of some rams and finally harvested mine at 25 meters. Difficulty with a bow: Extremely high. Other animals: We didn't see caribou or bears in the sheep area, though we did see bears around base camp. Would I recommend it?: Absolutely. It is very remote and logistically challenging, but it was an incredible bow hunt—and likely one of the hunts of a lifetime. This would be the second Snow Sheep ever harvested with a bow, and the first with a compound bow. The previous one was taken by an American in 1992 using a traditional bow—back in the days when hunters had to smuggle bows in their luggage just to hunt in the former Soviet Union. Now, *that* was a real feat.

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