We made it today all the way from Ulubantaar ... we flew from there to the city of Hove and then that was about a three-hour flight and then we drove for about six more hours to the Altay Argali camp. So we're up here now at about 9,000 feet living in a gur (or yurt). Beautiful weather right now. It's been horrible weather for about week, apparently, the guys haven't been seeing any sheep, they say it's the weather, but also they had a real bad winter. So they're warning me every which way not to set my sights too high on getting a big sheep because the winter was so bad. And I keep telling them that we have to try to see what we can find. Everything looks good so far, but real barren country. Snow everywhere on the peaks around us and much, much higher country than we've been hunting and steeper country too. The year before last an outfitter from Africa shot a great big giant Argali, 57 inches, here, so we're hoping there are a couple at least or maybe one that made it through the bad winter. It will be an interesting hunt. I'm looking forward to it. It's a pinnacle in any hunter's career to hunt these high Altay Argali's; they're a very difficult animal to get to to hunt and there are only about 10 a year that are hunted, so it's a big deal. I've been saving my pennies for 20 years to try to come on this hunt, so it's a real important one for me. Like I say, one of the pinnacles of my hunting career and really excited about it and quite nervous about he outcome because of the bad winter.

The Next Day ...

First day of Altay Argali hunting is over. It was a good day. We saw almost 200 ewes and lambs a long, long way away, and then we found a group of 13 rams. One was right at 50 inches which is an OK ram, nothing special, something that I don't want to go home with unless it's sort of a last resort, and then we didn't see any more rams the rest of the day. Wind came up, bad weather, rain, ugly, but we have snow in the higher elevations, and we have hope that tomorrow will be a better day. It's looking cloudy right now, but we've got our fingers crossed because we're heading out on horses for a real long one into the high, high mountains. So they're re-shoeing the horses tonight to give them spiked shoes so they can keep their grip up the mountain. Hopefully we'll find the sheep. My guide is excellent. Thirty-two years old, really professional, he's a hard hunter, works hard all the time. He's honest; we're gettting along good. I have great confidence that he will find us a bigger ram with luck. It's cold here!

The Next Day ...

Got up this morning absolutely pouring rain, wind, ugly, foggy. We waited for a couple of hours then tried to go anyway on horseback, got up into the mountains sort of in between squalls. We got sleeted on, hammered by 40 mile per hour winds didn't see any sheep, and by 3 o'clock called it off because we were soaking wet and just all around a dismal day . The guys are working hard, not their fault, we're pretty sure we know which mountain the sheep are on, but it's this huge giant mountain that is like 10 miles long kind of thing. They're somewhere up there, we just can't find them. It's going to be a horseback job from here on in. We're hoping for good weather. That's all we need. If we get a couple, three days of good weather, we'll find them. The ger that we're in is nice and warm. They're heating it with cow dung, dried, and it burns in the wood stove. They use sheep pellets for the kindling ... pretty cool. And the horse droppings as well. So if you get the right mixture you get a great heat coming out of that little stove ... Tough physical day. These horses are wilder than heck. Jittery, can't walk within 10 feet of their rear ends, or they just line you up and smoke you with their hooves, so we have to be careful about that. Saw a lot of yak as well in the high country.

The Next Day ...

We got up this morning at 4 a.m. Woke up there was 3 inches of fresh snow on the ground and it was snowing hard, that's down at our camp level which is about 8,500 feet in elevation, but we're hunting up at about 11,000 feet, so we know there's a lot more snow up there. We basically just hung around all day. The snow finally stopped and it started breaking up, the sun came out about 3 in the afternoon and started melting the snow and allowed us to get out of here but only about 3 p.m. Went to a place we could glass and spotted eight rams, three in one group and five in another, but two miles away, too far to tell what they were except that they were rams. So we're all excited and we're hoping that we're going to get good weather. Right now standing here with the half moon peaking over the mountains behind me and there's not a cloud in the sky ... cold, cold but hopefully this weather will hold for a few days and allow us to get up in the mountains. They're a little concerned about taking the horses up into the snow because I guess the horses' feet get packed up with sloppy snow and they end up like tobaggans going downhill; very dangerous. We think we can get to those rams that we saw today by horseback and hiking, but if they're not big enough then we'll have to make a decision whether we go into the danger zone or not because we have to go about three hours on the horseback up in the mountaintops to get to where we need to get to the second spot to look. We haven't been able to check it yet because the weather has been too bad.