Beau Martonik sits down with Adam Foss, the youngest bowhunter to complete the North American sheep slam and a photographer and filmmaker. Adam grew up west of Calgary in an archery only zone, killed his first ram at 18, and says his main focus right now is backpack hunting stone sheep with a bow in northern BC.
Most of this conversation is about the mental side of hard hunts. Adam is upfront that he's never run the numbers on his own sheep success, but figures it might be under five percent, and he thinks the pressure to define a hunt by whether you killed something is something we build in our own heads. He walks through how he keeps himself in a trip on day eight when the pull to go home gets loud, the 20 steps and five breaths method he and his wife used packing a ram uphill through shale, and why he thinks any of this applies just as well to elk hunting, running a marathon, or being around more for your family.
Also covered: the SITKA photo contest where he critiqued Beau's finalist photo back in 2017, a mountain goat he shot at 31 or 32 yards on Kodiak Island in a whiteout with his hood covering one eye, the whitetail does he ground out on pressured southern BC public land on the last day of the season two years running, and Migrate, the travel and bowhunting company he launched with his hunting partner Luke.
Adam hid a code word in this one. First person to comment it wins an arrow case from Migrate. It's near the end, so listen for it.
00:00:00 — Intro
00:04:20 — The SITKA photo contest where Adam tore up Beau's photo
00:10:03 — Subalpine, Barklow, and the early SITKA years
00:12:38 — Youngest bowhunter to take the North American sheep slam
00:14:43 — Growing up in southern Alberta with a bow and a camera
00:27:08 — Frankie, the three hour flight, and the shoot he couldn't say no to
00:35:03 — The hardest anyone has ever worked for a whitetail doe
00:41:24 — Hunting low density sheep country on purpose
00:48:07 — Letters to outfitters and 30 day pack strings
00:50:28 — Jack O'Connor, and looking up from the book to see it
00:53:35 — 16mm sheep footage from the sixties
00:55:51 — What makes sheep hunters this obsessed
01:04:24 — Is grit something you're born with or something you build
01:05:45 — It doesn't have to be sheep hunting
01:07:32 — Beau's first elk hunt and getting humbled by the steepest deepest
01:09:30 — The float plane leaves and you make the next best decision
01:15:21 — Aging a ram, and what the horn rings tell you
01:16:36 — Nobody cares if you kill a ram
01:18:41 — You picked it because it was hard
01:19:17 — Beau's 14 days on an Alaska moose hunt
01:22:52 — Snack times, burpees, and 20 steps at a time
01:32:22 — The Kodiak goat stalk in a whiteout
01:44:01 — Migrate, and the problems nobody was solving
01:48:19 — The unforced error that costs people animals
02:00:11 — Why five arrows beats no arrows
02:03:41 — Where to find Adam and Migrate
Adam's IG: https://www.instagram.com/fossman8/
Migrate IG: https://www.instagram.com/migrate_gear/
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