Once again I'll have to agree 100% with Flags. Bighorn sheep meat tastes nothing like domestic mutton. I've been lucky enough to have eaten the meat of over 3 dozen elk and of 3 bighorn rams and 1 Dall ram. The wild sheep meat was far better than any of the elk.
I also like to hunt wild sheep more than any other North American game animals. They are a magnificent animal and they are found in some of the most beautiful country in the world.
I was lucky enough to have lived in Montana at a time when we could buy an unlimited bighorn ram tag every year, and many years the harvest quota would not be filled in the 3 month season.
Times have changed. Now, many of the previous unlimited bighorn tag units have closed. Others have gone to draw units, and now you can only either buy an unlimited bighorn tag or apply for a draw unit. You can't do both like we used to be able to do.
The last time that I bought an unlimited ram tag, I packed a horse camp in several days before the season opened and camped about a mile from where a friend had killed a great ram the previous year. The afternoon before the season opened I found an old full curl broomed ram, and we left him undisturbed.
The next morning my son and I were at the spot where we had spotted the ram the day before. It was still dark and we could hear an outfitter's horses across the canyon as he brought his hunters in. A local hunter had backpacked in and set up his camp a few hundred yards from where we had seen the ram the afternoon before. When daylight came we could see 3 separate tent camps in the grassy opening on the other side of the canyon.
My son and I spent the whole opening day hunkered down overlooking that valley. We watched a black bear in the bottom of the valley, 2 mountain goats walked through the trees less than 100 yards below us, and several bighorn ewes and a young ram grazed by us close enough that we could hear them biting off the grass that they were eating. Several times other hunters walked by us, some saw us, others didn't.
We stayed the full 5 days of the season hunting the main canyon where we had seen the sheep, plus other canyons on both sides of our camp. We were contacted by a Montana game warden on horseback that told us that a grizzly had been seen in the valley below our camp. A Yellowstone Park ranger in full camouflage stopped by our camp to check our food storage. We met a Yellowstone packer with a string of pack horses that was supplying the Park rangers that were patrolling the Park boundary.
The only other rams that we saw on that trip were through my spotting scope and they were on a side ridge inside Yellowstone National Park. I didn't hear of any rams killed in that unit that year.