One Heck Of A Ride

176 Chapter 22 The Great Marco Polo Sheep Of The Tien Shan F rom The Great Arc of the Wild Sheep by James L. Clark: “Of all the wild sheep of the world, there is none more widely known or better publicized than the (polii). Ever since Marco Polo made his epical journey to the silkened courts of Kublai Khan some seven hundred years ago, the world has known of this wild sheep. (Marco Polo’s) reports of this fabulous animal with its extraordinary horns were even beyond the imagination of the learned.” From The SCI Record Book of Trophy Animals: “The Marco Polo is one of the finest The camp doctor checking blood pressure before leaving for the high mountain wild sheep and is one of the world’s very top hunting trophies. It lives at high altitudes that not all hunters can cope with; some have been stricken with pulmonary edema and have required evacuation. One should not attempt this hunt without a good level of cardiovascular fitness and a recent medical examination.” In August 2,000, I spent nineteen hours in several jetliners traveling to Istanbul before continuing on to Bishkek, the capital city of the Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyzstan). I spent the night there and joined four other hunters and Harv Holleck, the booking agent who had booked our Marco Polo argali hunts. The next day, six of us – Gaylen Kirn from Los Osos, California, a Texan named Zeke, a University of Alaska professor, a young hunter, Harv and I – spent another fourteen hours sitting on benches in the back of a box-like Russian-built van with all our gear and gun cases as we bounced across primitive roads. Our route skirted the edge of the longest range of mountains in the world, the mighty Tien Shan, heading southeast to a campsite near the Naryn River and the Chinese border. It was easy to see why these mountains came to be called the Tien Shan, literally the “Celestial Mountain.” Our base camp’s elevation was 12,627 feet above sea level and the snow-covered peaks around its valley soared another 6,000-7,000 feet above us. We truly were closer to heaven. The camp was nothing like those I’d found in China and Mongolia. This camp consisted of four box-like trailers and a yurt in the sandy bottom Main camp for the Marco Polo argali hunt – four small trailers and a yurt – in Kyrgyzstan