Tiny odds turn out good for bighorn hunter

Fred Riggs was so sure he’d never draw a tag to hunt bighorn sheep that he dallied a good long while before even trying for one.

Until he was 83, in fact.

But he only had to wait til he was 84 to get lucky.

Riggs, who has lived in Richland since 1937, and been hunting in Baker County almost as long, will have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to kill a bighorn ram.

His hunt, in the Lookout Mountain unit south of Richland, runs from Aug. 28 through Sept. 8.

To say Riggs beat long odds to obtain this coveted tag is to engage in egregious understatement.

Last year, the most recent for which statistics are available, 414 hunters applied for the first of the two annual Lookout Mountain bighorn hunts (the second hunt, also limited to a single tag, is set for Sept. 11-26).

“That’s not too good odds,” Riggs said.

Which is precisely why, until last year, he never bothered to apply for a tag.

This, despite his being pretty familiar with the herd of Rocky Mountain bighorns that roams the Lookout Mountain unit.

Riggs is a longtime friend of Walt Forsea, who owns several thousand acres in the part of Lookout Mountain — namely, the Connor Creek country — where the sheep live the majority of the year.

“We’ve gone over there and watched them,” Riggs said.

Because the bighorns are hardly pressured by hunters — just two tags per year, plus an occasional hunter from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation — the animals usually aren’t skittish in the manner of, say, deer and elk, which are pursued annually by hundreds or even thousands of hunters.

Riggs said he’s seen bighorns, including trophy rams, stand placidly in the middle of Connor Creek Road.

But he knows enough of wild animals, no matter how tame they might act when nobody’s aiming a rifle at them, to expect that sort of cooperation come Aug. 28.

“I doubt they’ll do that for me during the hunting season,” Riggs said.

Still and all, he figures he stands a decent chance of bagging a nice ram.

Although Riggs hasn’t been scouting the country much this summer, he gets regular reports from his cadre of clandestine informants.

Well, actually he just chats with some of Forsea’s cowboys, who cover a considerable spread of territory while checking on cattle in summer pasture.

A successful hunt would make for a fine culmination of sorts to Riggs’ exploits as a hunter.

He was born in Turner, just outside Salem, and he moved to Richland with his parents when he was in fourth grade.

“I’ve been here almost long enough to be a native,” he said with a laugh.

For a few years Riggs tagged along with his dad and older brother when they went hunting.

But when he turned 12, or maybe he was 13, he started carrying his own rifle and bagging his own meat.

“I only missed two hunting seasons, when I was in the service,” he said.

Riggs served in the U.S. Army during the final two years of World War II, first in the Philippines, then in Japan.

Mainly he went after Baker County’s plentiful deer and elk, interspersed with a couple of trips to British Columbia where he killed a moose each time.

Early in Riggs’ hunting career, bighorns weren’t an option, at least in Baker County, because the animals had been extirpated by a combination of overhunting and diseases spread by domestic livestock.

Rocky Mountain bighorns remained absent from Oregon until 1971 (another subspecies, the California bighorn, is much more numerous in the state, including a herd in the Burnt River Canyon between Durkee and Bridgeport).

That year the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) moved a group of Rocky Mountain bighorns from Jasper National Park in Canada to Hells Canyon and the Wallowas.

The Connor Creek herd was established during the winter of 1994, when 24 Rocky Mountain bighorns trapped in Montana were released along Fox Creek, just south of Connor Creek.

The herd has thrived, and now numbers around 90 sheep.

Riggs said he remembers both the 1971 and 1994 bighorn transplants.

He even knows a couple other Baker County hunters who have drawn a once-in-a-lifetime tag for the Lookout Mountain hunt over the past decade.

In 2005, for instance, both tags for the Lookout Mountain hunt went to Baker County residents: Ed Elms and Mark Christman.

That same year, John McLean of Huntington drew a bighorn tag for the Burnt River Canyon hunt.

Yet, despite that favorable local history, Riggs resisted the temptation to apply for a bighorn tag until 2009.

“I just decided, well, they’re right here local so I’ll give a try for a year or two,” he said.

And two years, as it turned out, was all Riggs needed.

“I put a little honey on (my application) and it stuck to someone’s finger,” he said, chuckling.

Riggs learned of his good fortune while, of all things, talking with a car salesman.

He was over at Powder River Motors one day in late June, chatting to salesman Paul Schon, and they got around to discussing their hunting plans.

Neither had yet checked the ODFW Web site for the recently released results of the annual hunting tag lottery.

Schon asked Riggs if he had his hunting license number.

Riggs did, and Schon tapped the digits into his computer.

“Then he turned to me and said, ‘I’ll be damned, you got the sheep tag,’ ” Riggs said.

“I didn’t figure I ever had a chance.”

But now Riggs, who retired 25 years after from Idaho Power Co., will get the chance, using his reliable old 30.06.

“I guess I’ll try to make the best of it,” he said. “I better — it is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”

And one worth waiting almost the whole of a lifetime for.