The Mighty Richardsons

I’ve seen photos of the place and the animals it holds.

For me, it wasn’t necessarily the size of this sheep's horns that made me want to venture into the Richardsons but rather the beauty of the land, the opportunity to explore this area by wearing out another pair of hiking boots, and the thought of sheep tenderloin melting in my mouth.

Ask me how someone ever captured these stunning images of the Richardsons, I couldn’t tell you. I spent a week in the Richardsons and could barely see my feet let alone sun gleaming off rolling mountains in their gold autumn foliage.

I convinced my ski coach that hunting is indeed ski training and that hiking around in a remote Yukon mountain range would fit nicely in place of the roller skiing volume block that was planned for me. Dust swirled behind the car as I sped down the Dempster Highway. The thirteen hours from Whitehorse passed quicker than the hour I spent in traffic on my way to the Calgary airport. I’d never been passed the Tombstone Mountain Range before and it was apparent the Dempster’s beauty didn’t stop at the Tombstone’s jagged peaks, but rather kept on blossoming into the vast tundra and white rock mountains of the Ogilvies. It was smooth sailing and sunny skies all the way past the Arctic Circle. Going over Wright Pass on the Richardson Mountains however was like opening the door of a cozy cabin to a raging blizzard. Dark clouds swallowed up the sun and a sudden snowstorm caused whiteout conditions where driving was barely possible. Descending across the NWT border, blizzards turned into torrential rains and mud caked my tires, but I’d made it. “This is madness”, I thought.

Here I was about to depart on a solo, week long, backpacking sheep hunt. I was already regretting not turning back for my weeks supply of cheese and salami. 45 minutes out of Whitehorse I realized I’d forgotten the meat and cheese in the fridge at home. I was too excited to finally be on the road to make rational decisions. As I set out in the rain I thought about what else I might add to my plain macaroni, stoned wheat crackers, white rice, quinoa and couscous.

I walked until the light started to fade and set up camp on a small gravel bar littered with grizzly tracks next to a noisy creek and high willow bushes. I know, it sounds stupid but it was getting dark and finding a suitable spot to pitch a tent in this country would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. I buried my food bag under a pile of rocks several meters from the tent and reasoned with myself that perhaps it was a good thing I forgot the salami.

I woke to a damp, soggy morning but was thankful no bear had shown up in the night. Breakfast was a great meal because it was one of the few that can go without meat and cheese. On a full belly of oatmeal I headed off in the fog. I stumbled upon an old rusted 30-30 level action lying in the moss. I picked it up but the action was rusted shut and the wood stock badly deteriorating. I placed it back in its place and not a second later looked up to see a big old "grizz" walking right towards me! I froze as the figure appeared through the fog. I was downwind. The bear spotting me right away, stoop up on its hind legs, and fell forward into a full charge. I frantically flung my rifle off my pack and slammed a bullet in the chamber. The bear stopped short of me and I slowly backed away, rifle at the ready. The big boar followed me, keeping the same distance until I was all the way back at my campsite on the gravel bar. I was relieved when it seemed as though I was finally out of his zone. The problem now was that I had to choose a different route which would add a considerable distance. I started up the adjacent drainage. Fifteen minutes after finally ditching the bear, I spotted another grizzly just ahead! This one was busy eating berries and had not seen me yet. I managed to avoid the bear without it sensing my presence but it meant doing an even longer detour. I was way off course but at least made it to higher ground, out of the valleys and hopefully bear country.

Navigating by topo map was troubling for me in the fog. I could not make out any of the defining mountains or ridges. One drainage runs straight north along the Yukon side of the NWT border. North was the direction I was headed so I figured I would drop down into the valley and follow the creek. The walking was awful. What looks like a soccer field from a distance, is actually muskeg and hummocks where I'd sink up to my knees in the mucky, saturated moss. Each step my hiking boots were suction-cupped into the ground. If it wasn’t for the permafrost I think the ground could very well have swallowed me up. I hiked to exhaustion. It was an eighteen-hour day on my feet but I had made it into the start of the zone where I was allowed to hunt sheep. I pitched my tent on a ledge above the creek and watched a band of caribou walk right by my camp. The biggest bull caribou I’d ever seen stood 100 yards off, rubbing the velvet off his antlers on the surrounding willows. I must say I was tempted. I had a caribou tag with me and here was the biggest caribou I’d ever seen, giving a 100-yard, broadside shot that I could take laying prone in my sleeping bag, out of my tent vestibule. Lucky for him, I was on a sheep hunt.“Hopefully the mountains will show themselves tomorrow” I thought as I drifted to sleep.

I dreamt of the old 30-30 rifle and the unfortunate soul who'd perhaps encountered the very grizzly in that same spot years earlier. What was his fate? 

I awoke with the false sense of hope strewn upon me by my orange tent fly that seems to make even the cloudiest days look bright through its fabric. Reality sunk in when I stuck my head out the tent, it was wet with low-lying clouds, same as the past two days. Rather discouraged, I busted out the satellite phone I’d borrowed and phoned my friend Colin for the weather report. Colin’s cheerful voice was a pleasant sound after listening to myself swear and bitch for the past couple days. Pleasant as it were, the weather forecast he gave me was for rain, rain, and more rain. I sat in my tent procrastinating putting on my soaking wet hikers. By late morning the deed was finally done and I set off up the mountain to see if by some chance I could break through the cloud cover. This is where I hoped to be glassing sheep on Mt Millen, one of The Richardson’s highest peaks. Who was I kidding?

I hunkered behind a pile of rocks as hurricane force winds threatened to blow me off the mountain. Spotting sheep seemed far-fetched while literally being inside a cloud. What to do? I wanted the weather forecast to be wrong. A dreadful thought filled my head: “If I call it right now, I’ll have flown to Yukon, driven a thousand miles, hiked all this way through muskeg, mountains, buck brush and grizzlies and have nothing to show for it”. I was only able to make up my mind when an even more dreadful thought filled my head: “If by some miracle I shoot a sheep up here, I have to go through everything I’ve already done but with an entire Dall ram on my back”.

I took my first few steps in the direction home. “You’re Knute Johnsgaard, you don’t give up” I’d turn back around and the wind would blast me in the face. I stood on top of the mountain in the storm as my brain reasoned with my ego to finally let me turn back. I felt crushed. The mountaintop became vast. Obstacles appeared through the cloud at last minute. One detour after another found me overlooking a steep creek gully. This was bad. My map didn’t have this creek on it. I enabled my smart phone’s GPS. Unless I somehow wandered over five kilometers off track, into the NWT, it had to be wrong. “I don’t get lost”, I told myself. I once again reasoned with my ego, confirming the GPS location by the landmarks around the creek. I pointed myself in the right direction, turned off my phone, and started back into the Yukon. I continued through the mist for a few hours. I would try to drop back down into the same valley I’d come in on. It runs straight for fifteen kilometers and is easier to follow than the ridge. I started descending into the valley, was I having déjà vu? I stopped in my tracks. A grizzly had charged me but I’d never felt this scared in my life. This was either the exact same creek I’d seen hours earlier or I was going completely insane. I sat down exhausted and soaking wet and treated myself to the last of my stroopwafles, basically the only “good” food I’d brought after forgetting my cheese and salami. It was a rough day physically but all the hurt in my joints and muscles could not be felt next to the screaming frustration of having given up, only to have gotten lost. I imagined glassing sheep on an alpine meadow under sunny skies in the Yukon’s Southern Lakes region.

I put my mind over matter and came to grips with the fact I was not invincible, but rather vulnerable because of my own pigheadedness. My new goal was to simply make it out of the clouds and into what I’d deemed “The Great Valley” by nightfall. I met that goal by periodically checking my phone’s GPS. As I broke through the cloud level, descending into the valley I felt immediately better. I had spent the entire day lost in the clouds; lesson learned to always travel with a compass.

I was now paralleling the creek in the wide-open valley. The walking was hard but being able to see my surroundings was enough to keep me in good spirits. I felt like a child on an Easter egg hunt as I walked through miles of cloudberry habitat; they were just sparse enough to get really excited at the discovery of a big juicy one.

Yesterday’s feelings of self-pity were starting to be replaced by new hopes of harvesting a caribou closer to the road. Caribou are considerably larger than sheep and as I walked I debated how close to the road was close enough. No sooner did I start to think I might be “close enough” did I spot a band of caribou about a mile opposite the creek. When the 500m no-hunting corridor was introduced on the Dempster Highway, people were outraged at the inconvenience it would cause them. I would show those lazy people how hunting is supposed to be. I checked my map: 15km as the crow flies. There’d be no guaranteeing I’d see caribou from the highway. I wanted to seal the deal right here; it was an easy decision.

Caribou don’t always stick around like sheep so I wanted to move quickly. I crossed the creek, ditching my pack on the other side for the final stalk. With little more than my rifle and granola bar I did the classic half bent over speed walk up towards the caribou. The wind was in my favor but it was a blind stalk, meaning because of the rise in the land there was no line of sight between the caribou and myself. To be on the safe side I side-hilled way above where I thought they’d be. As I tip toed over the rise it was apparent I had been a little too conservative. I had a lot of ground to cover still but was better positioned and approached quickly upon the unsuspecting herd. I transitioned from being bent over to crawling to inching on my belly until I was within 200 yards. A bull bedded just below me presented a good opportunity but the bigger bulls were out of range below it. I waited patiently for the bull to join the others so I could get a better look at the rest of the herd. Right now he was just an obstacle. He only moved when it looked like the rest of the herd were making their way down the valley and he didn’t want to get left behind. I followed quickly as if I too were getting left behind, but stayed out of sight. The caribou were now clearly on the move and I feared I had missed my chance. I lay prone, nestled into a good rest and ranged them at 260 yards. It was a little further than I would have liked but I had a good broadside shot on one of the lead bulls so I took it. The shot echoed across the valley and the big bull staggered backwards and fell.

No matter what hardships lay ahead, it was a successful hunt from this point forward. I snapped a couple photos with my phone (easier said than done with nothing but moss, shrubs, and a couple rocks to prop it up on). As I headed back up the creek for my pack the clouds dropped and I was socked in again. I had placed my pack just up from a defining bend in the creek but the dips and hummocks in the land could hide a school bus. I circled the area high and low before resorting to a grid search. In a way, losing my pack was almost worst than getting lost myself. At least I had with me the necessities to survive when I was lost on top of the mountain. I now had my belt knife, a rifle and matches and had already eaten my granola bar. And honestly what good are matches when you’re in a saturated alpine swamp, a two days walk from the nearest spruce tree. I was screwed. The grid pattern search eventually paid off and I swore never to leave my pack again without putting a waypoint in my phone’s GPS.

In a couple hours I had all the meat neatly deboned and in game bags and the antlers stripped of their velvet to save every extra ounce of weight. I split my haul into two loads. I had made a “tundra sled” as I called it out of a crazy carpet, broken carbon fiber ski poles and rope. I was quite proud of my creation and it did slide like a dream along the moss but every couple meters it would tip over on a hummock and the many boulders and willows I had to navigate rendered it useless. The load was almost unbearable as I packed it up the mountain pass. I dropped my pack at a spot that would make do for a campsite and headed down for the second load. It was quite a change to walk with nothing but a rifle and water bottle in my pack. I’d completely forgotten how leisurely walking normally was, even with the rugged terrain. My happiness ended when I hoisted the second load onto my back. I had obviously done a poor job at making two equal loads and the second was considerably heavier. Beaten and battered I finally made it to “camp”.  I had one liter of water to cook dinner with that I had unfortunately added sport drink to earlier. The caribou fried in its own fat made up for the expired Sidekick noodles cooked in Emend.

The rate at which I was moving was starting to sink in and my misjudgment was coming into perspective. Two trips means twice as far right? Wrong, because you’ve got to go all the way back to start your second trip, thus making it three times as far. Grueling as it was, I was headed back to my car with 160 pounds of precious meat and a beautiful set of antlers; I was ecstatic. Boiled meat for lunch and dinner, the more I ate the less I had to carry.

One more day! I was starting to exhaust my singing voice and song lyrics but I was back in the same area where I’d been charged by the grizzly so I sang loud and clear “But I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more, just be the man who walked a thousand miles and is really sore. Da-da-da, da-da-da, my legs are really fucking sore.” Other song variations included most of today’s pop melodies supplemented with swear words and lyrics about being tired, hungry, and hurting all over. My pack weighed so much that my heavy-duty nylon hip strap broke. I jerry rigged it with cord from my tundra sled but much of the weight load remained on my shoulders. The willows were thick like brambles and I found simply walking right in the creek was best. Letting the current carry my feet downstream, the creek was essentially making my footsteps for me, or at least I liked to think of it that way to ease the effort. Without my repurposed ski poles I would have likely fallen on my face, been pinned down by my pack and drowned.

Reaching the car was a milestone. I was so happy I almost wanted to say fuck going back for the last load, but of course I didn’t. Walking back empty was countered by having to heave each step against the creek's current.

On the final return trip I was running on fumes with nothing but adrenaline keeping me going. I’d pick a spot in the distance and challenge myself to make it that far without stopping for rest. My last song before reaching the car was Hallelujah.