Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Great Trek and Hunt in the Himalaya Mountains!

March 12 my wife and I started our long planned trip to Nepal. I had booked this hunting adventure with Clark Jeffs of  Safari Outfitters, through their long time partner Nepal Wildlife Adventure.
We were met in Kathmandu by Shova and Prem Singh of NWA, who also solved all the hassle about gun-importing next day.
March 16 we flew to Dorpatan by helicopter where we met Armen Avidissian,Bernie Mizrahi and Henry Davidian. They had just finished their hunting and had all been succesfull in an area  near Dorpatan.

My hunting was to be in the Seng region, which eventually took a six day trek. I had insisted on this trek to be able to acclimatise better to the altitude, even though my wife and I both had been training very hard in preparation for this trip.
Thanks to this trek we have seen a lot of everyday life in the mountains of  Nepal, it was worth every second of it!
We had 22 people escorting us during this trek, from camp manager to cooks to guides to porters………… 

After arrival in the Seng region the guides went scouting for sheep. The third day of the hunt the guides and I climbed from 3.675 meters to 4.250 meters, within 2 hours. From our glassing spot we found 11 male sheep, about 1.500 meters away. As there were a few very good ones in that group we decided to approach them, it has taken us 5 hours to close the distance to 265 meters, but I suspect we did more than 3.000 meters going up and down and up again, and again!

When finally into place we were at 4.188 meters altitude , and as said before 265 meters separated us from the sheep.
It should have been an easy shot but the ram was hit too far back and did not drop immediately so the guides Bir and Toklama followed it and, after it had fallen for more than 200 meters, had to cape it on the spot were it fell. They did a wonderfull job in retrieving the animal!

With the hunt finished we used a few days to trek back leisurely to Yamkhar at 2.850 meters, from where we were picked up by the helicopter to return to Kathmandu. We had a tremendous time!
Jan P.