Can boots-on-the-ground hunting help eliminate and restore the wild sheep roaming Montana’s Tendoy Mountains?

As rooted in conservation as they are in designing industry-leading performance apparel, Sitka Gear has partnered with the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Wild Sheep Foundation to present the cinematography-rich, entertaining and ultra-informative film Tendoys.

The words inked here can’t do justice to the power of this film, but in short, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks department announced an unprecedented unlimited number of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep tags – tags to be utilized in Montana’s storied Tendoy Mountains.

By 1940, bighorn sheep were considered by Montana biologists to be extinct in the Tendoys. In 1985, 39 wild bighorn sheep, along with another 14 in 1986, were reintroduced into the Tendoys. By 1993, the herd grew to over 150 animals, but the herd suffered a major mid-1990s loss when struck by an all-age pneumonia. As Craig Fager, FWD Dillion-area biologist, explains in the film, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department has made three significant pushes to augment the sheep population, but all those augmentations failed.

The film documents very well the story of how team Sitka and Afghanistan veteran and Montana native Tony Larsen dive into the Tendoys in an effort to help the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks department use hunting to eradicate the current herd, create a buffer between wild and domestic sheep in the region, and restore the Tendoys with a clean, healthy herd.

To view the film in its entirety, visit www.sitkagear.com. For more information about the Wild Sheep Foundation or Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, visit www.wildsheepfoundation.org or www.fwp.mt.gov.