I hunted with Mahesh Busnyat of Himalayan Safaris, and I arranged the trip through Bob Kern at The Hunting Consortium. Busnyat has a concession in the huge and remote Dhorpatan Hunting Reserve in western Nepal. Kern and his crew did an outstanding job of arranging almost everything. The few things that did go wrong were to be expected when you're the first one into a place after a six-year closure. At least I didn't suffer the terrible indignity fellow subscriber Ed Yates did last year, when he waited in a Kathmandu hotel for nine days only to have Nepalese officials ultimately refuse to issue him a hunt permit!
As for the hunt, it took 3½ days of walking from the nearest sizable village to reach our base camp. The village was at 8,500 feet; base camp was at 12,800 feet, and we hunted upward from there to as high as 15,200 feet (these are actual altimeter readings, not estimates). The circumstances of this hunt were extremely difficult. We walked seven to 10 miles each day. Busnyat estimates we walked about 60 miles total. That may not sound very far, but you must consider the altitude and the weather. The day we climbed to our highest elevation we were driven down by an inch-an-hour blast of snow that made it hard to move around, much less see where you were going. I was literally snowed out except for parts of four days.
This time of year it's supposed to be........(continued)
