BRETT FRENCH | bfrench@billingsgazette.com
Horsepacking was the main means of outfitting and guiding hunters in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Area when Jack Atcheson Jr. entered the region in the mid-1960s.
The Forest Service, which oversees permits for outfitters, authorized horsepackers’ fixed base camps, usually tied to one area where the tents would be set up and feed hauled in for horses. Atcheson, however, wanted to offer his clients a different experience.
“I wanted to get a progressive travel permit where I could move around and low-impact camp wherever we happened to be at when the sun went down on any particular day,” he said.
Luckily, the forest supervisor he pitched his idea to was a Butte High graduate and had hunted bighorn sheep. The supervisor authorized the permit and Atcheson Jr. launched his business touting the uniqueness of the outings.
“There is no hunting opportunity in the entire world that is quite like that,” he said.
That’s partly because it’s not easy. Atcheson Jr. would spend 10 days to two weeks in the mountains in search of a ram while carrying 75 to 80 pounds in a backpack, yet he called it the “purest form of hunting” due to the challenges involved and the Spartan-like environment.
“You’ve gotta nut up, basically.”
Since bighorns have a “nasty habit” of leaving, Atcheson was an advocate for sticking with any rams he located.
“If we saw a ram right at dark, and we were 10 miles from camp, we made a nice little nest for ourselves, and that’s where we spent the night.
“Sometimes we got sheep, but sometimes we just got cold.”
Although a Butte, America, native, Atcheson Jr. is a world traveler.
According to the Jack Atcheson & Sons, Inc., website, Atcheson Jr. has visited Africa almost every year since 1971 and has hunted on six continents. At age 23 he completed the North American sheep grand slam, bagging all four species — Dall’s sheep, Stone’s sheep, Rocky Mountain bighorn and desert bighorn.
“Jack Jr. was chosen as a member of the first Sino-American Wildlife Survey of the Tibetan Plateau in China’s Qinghai Province in 1985, becoming one of the first Americans to visit the region since Kermit Roosevelt in the 1920s,” according to the website, and was invited to explore Russia’s east to evaluate it for potential hunting and fishing business.
From 2011 to 2013 he served as chairman of the National Wild Sheep Foundation and then spent nine years as director of the group.
His father, in addition to founding the hunting consultant business from Butte, was well known for his conservation work including opening state lands to public use and lobbying for passage of the stream access law.
Despite his wealth of experience and deep ties to Montana conservation issues, Atcheson Jr. requested that his recent donation of a full-sized ram mount to Red Lodge High School downplay his role in the gift.
“This is not about me, and I don’t want it to be a me story,” Atcheson Jr. said. “I’m really a big fan of wild sheep in Montana, and trying to put focus on the sheep and their needs.”
As Ty Stubblefield, executive director of the Montana Wild Sheep Foundation noted, that’s hard to do given Atcheson Jr.’s deep ties to the animals.
“Jack Atcheson Jr. has 50-plus years of dedication to the world of wild sheep conservation and has traveled the globe advocating for the preservation of many sheep species,” Stubblefield wrote in an email. “But Jack’s life work and dedication lies in the heart of Montana where he has done as much or more than any Montanan ever has to help assure our state’s bighorns don’t become a thing of the past.
“Bringing his hard-earned unlimited ram back to the foot of the Beartooths after 40 years absent has a special meaning for Jack, and his hopes are that it inspires the students of Red Lodge High School to endure much like Montana’s bighorn sheep have.”