Noella Sarnow is 17 and a senior in high school. Without telling her, I put her in for an S31 Rocky Mountain bighorn ram tag in the South San Juans.
According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), her chance of drawing was only about 0.6 percent. Somehow, she drew it.
Once she realized what an extraordinary opportunity she’d been given, she was determined to do everything she could to make the most of it. She spent much of the summer preparing at the shooting range.
As a D1 soccer recruit, she was already in excellent physical condition, and her experience of mountain and rock climbing — and comfort navigating cliffs and steep terrain — proved invaluable in the rugged country where we found the sheep.
There’s also a bit of Pagosa Springs history behind the hunt.
I’m Pierre Sarnow, Pagosa Springs High School class of 1998. My brothers Andre Sarnow (1990) and Jacques Sarnow (2000) and I grew up in Pagosa, and our parents, Stuart and Marcella Sarnow, still live there. We still come back to hunt elk and deer around Pagosa nearly every fall, and Noella Sarnow has joined us on several of those hunts in previous years.
When she drew the sheep tag, it became a family project. My brothers put in an incredible amount of time scouting, planning and hiking with us. There’s a neat connection with Andre Sarnow in particular: When he was in high school, he spent a summer counting bighorn sheep for CPW in this same unit. More than 30 years later, he was back there helping his niece hunt them.
Our friend Zac Petty, from Bayfield, was also a huge part of making the hunt possible. He spent a tremendous amount of time helping us scout and hunt and supplied the llamas we used to pack deep into the Fish Lake country and, ultimately, helped us bring the ram back out across some remarkably rugged terrain.
After a summer of preparation and a lot of effort from everyone, Noella Sarnow successfully harvested her ram. Getting into and back out of that country turned out to be quite an adventure in itself.
There’s even one last Pagosa connection: our childhood friend Kraig Candelaria, who has a taxidermy shop in town, is mounting the ram.
It was an extraordinary experience for her, but also a pretty special convergence of our family’s history in Pagosa, old friends, and a new generation hunting the same mountains we grew up in.
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