A More Relaxed Fall

The goat hunt would use the boat as more of a floating base camp and then we would take gifts out to look for goats. There would be no shortage of goats. There are goats in every direction. The goal would be to find a large goat in an accessible and recoverable location.

Lodging situation is quite civilized for a November Alaska goat hunt, to say the least

after landing, we went and shot the rifle and looked around for goats. We saw a potential goat in an accessible spot that the other Hunting party would try for in the morning.

The following day, the other Hunting party was successful while my guide and I looked for a billy for me. By late afternoon, we had one that was clearly large and dominant when compared to a smaller billy, and to the nannys that it was interested in. It was super interesting to watch these goats posture at each other. We even saw a little sea life, mainly seals and porpoises.
 
Cool adventures I guess, but have you ever gone on a second choice doe antelope hunt??
 
Don’t think I have any pictures of it but the boat food was incredible.

The day we landed and the following day the goats were down fairly low because it had just snowed. As it warmed up and began raining, the snow line rapidly receded, and it seemed that the goats would follow.
By the following morning, the snow line was about 2000 vertical feet from the ocean. That doesn’t sound bad, but it is nearly straight up and full of devils club, alder, and everything else that comes with SE AK.
I might actually have to do some work to get to them. Seems almost unreasonable for such a country club hunt! Ha

We got up early. With the short days, the plan was to try and spot the mature billy as soon as it was light enough to see, and if he was in an accessible location, to start climbing.


There were goats at the snowline, straight up from where the billy was the night before. We assume the bigger one is there and begin climbing.

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We knew that our goat that we needed a closer look at had two horizontal lines of dirt on his butt, with one of them having kind of a round ball shaped blob at the end.

After about 3 1/2 hours of climbing through absolute hell, we hit a forest that we dubbed the “magical forest“ because walking through it free of brush and thorns was just that… Magical

As we got to the top of the magical forest we were nearing the last known location of the goats. Across from us, a goat appeared.
As we were getting set up, he came right out onto a rock and just stared at us. He looked nice, but lone goats can be deceiving. Without anybody else to compare him to, we were holding off until we could confirm the markings on his rear end.




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Marking confirmed.
 

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