Mountain Goats- The Hunt of a Lifetime

[Gerald Martin]

Of all the hunts that I've been on in my limited hunting career, I have to rank the mountain goat as my favorite so far. My wife's bighorn sheep was right up there but for the sheer satisfaction at the end of a hunt I have more good memories from my goat than any other.

My desire to shoot a mountain goat started well before I move from Virginia to Montana in 2002. I had applied as a nonresident at least once if not twice before I moved. Each year the draws would be completed and I would receive my money back from the state. In 2005 several friends and I spent 11 days in a wilderness unit in southwestern MT hunting for elk.
The elk hunt was a total bust, but we did see a lot of goats.

I decided to start applying for that unit from then on. The unit is not known for big goats but it does have a lot of them and the draw odds are pretty good.

Fast forward to 2007. I was ecstatic to learn that I'd finally drawn a goat tag. Now I don't claim to be the brightest of hunters, but I am optimistic. I killed my moose in 2003 with my bow and I wanted to kill my goat with the bow also. Everyone told me that goats are relitively easy to stalk, getting the tag is the hard part, blah, blah, blah....., so I decided to make my bow the weapon of choice. Now I am optimistic, but also somewhat realistic. The was a backcountry deer and elk season open with the rifle in the same unit, so I made sure that at least one person was going to be carrying my rifle just in case we saw a big bull, buck, or billy that I couldn't get with my bow.

I was thankful that two of my B-in-laws and my brother agreed to go with me. The area I wanted to hunt started four miles in from the trailhead. and everything had to go in and out on our backs. I also wanted to try my best to video the hunt.

We decided that the first week of October would be the best time for our hunt. That would give the goats a little extra time to grow their winter hair and yet let us hunt before we got snowed out of the high country. Due to time restraints on the others in my group we would hunt Mon-Fri of that week and then I would have to figure something else out if I had to go back in again. I knew that that wasn't a lot of time to get it done, but like I said before, I'm optimistic.

So...... Goat hunting here we come.

First pictures. Ready to head out at the trail head, and hiking into goat country.

 

[mtmiller]

Ready for more pics. Keep 'em coming.

 

[Big Fin]

Looking forward to this one Gerald. I wish I had been as picture and video savvy in 1995 as I am know. I shot a great goat on a great hunt in some amazing country, and all I have to show for it is one very poor field photograph. Now that I am a little more photo/video connected, I will probably not draw again in my life. Oh well, live and learn.

Please continue Gerald.

 

[Gerald Martin]

I should introduce our group. In the first picture that I posted... From left to right... Junior, myself, Dave, my brother Kenneth.


By about 4 p.m on Mon. we had made it the four miles to our campsite and pitched our tents. We headed out for a quick hunt that evening but all we saw was a nice chocolate bear, lots of snow and more country than we could hunt in a month. I say we saw the bear, actually it was everyone but me, I was a hundred yards from the others glassing another basin. The bear would have been pretty easy for Junior or Dave to kill on video. They had my rifle and one of the cameras. Fortunately for the bear they decided not to complicate my hunt. I don't think I would have been quite so generous had I been in their shoes. We had agreed before the hunt started that while my goat was the focus, if any of the others wanted to shoot something they had a tag for they could do so, they would just be on their own packing the animal back to the truck. Anyway, they passed the bear, no goats were seen and we headed back to camp to make our plans for the next day.

This was the meager fare that we had to endure for our dinner.

 

[Gerald Martin]

After a good nights sleep we decided to head in a different direction the next morning. I want to explain the terrain a little bit. When we hiked into this country it looked as if the tops of the ridges and cliffs were fairly flat. From the valley floor it looked as if we should be able to summit to the top of a ridge and then walk the ridgeline. That would allow us to check a lot of drainages and cover a lot of ground in a day. Well as you all well know looks can be very deceiving.

Our plan for today was to bushwack to the otherside of the drainage our camp was in, summit the ridge and then check out the cliffs on each side of the ridge as we went. Did I mention before that I'm really optimistic?


My first clue that this was going to be harder than it looked should have been when it took us nearly three hours to climb the half mile from camp. My brother and I made it to the top only to be stopped in our tracks by a sheer 90' drop off that interrupted the ridge line. Junior and Dave tried to circumvent the drop off by staying lower on the ridge and working their way around . After Dave nearly got stuck and couldn't go up or down they "chickened" out and decided to come up on top with us. Here's some pictures of Tuesday forenoon.

 

[Gerald Martin]

How's it looking over that way Kenneth? See any goats?

 

[Dinkshooter]

Nice pics. Keep it up.

Careful calling them "hunts of a lifetime". The wife catches on to that chit pretty fast.

I thought you said last time was a "Hunt of a lifetime".

 

[Gerald Martin]

Houston!!! we might have a problem here. This looks a little steep.



Pictures really do not do this justice.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Okay, so plan A is not an option. We definitely aren't walking out this ridgeline. While Junior and Dave are backtracking and coming back up to meet us Kenneth and I sat down to do some serious glassing. We are overlooking a huge bowl that is about 1 mile across.

I hadn't sat down more that ten minutes when I picked out a yellow dot in the cliffs across the basin. A big billy was bedded out on a rock outcropping. The places goats go is simply amazing. He was bedded at the edge of an approximate 200' cliff. We put the spotting scope on him and watched as he change positions and then lay there calmly chewing his cud, like an invicible potentate surveying his kingdom. At one point he lay with his front leg fully extended in front of him, his leg was hanging out in midair.

Here's where the billy was bedded.

 

[Gerald Martin]

When Jr. and Dave made it up to us I was pumped. We had glassed the billy enough to know that he was in the 9" -10" range and was everything I was looking for in a goat. As they got to the top I was packing up and rareing to go.

They quickly put a stop to my plans by anouncing they weren't going anywhere until they had something to eat. While we took a quick lunch (by their standards, it took forever by mine) we glassed the goat and tried to plan a stalk.

After their harrowing climb I knew that Jr and Dave weren't too keen on climbing around in the cliffs, but somehow I sort of ignored their seeming lack of enthusiam for going after this goat. My tag was burning a hole in my pocket. There was a big billy in sight. I was going after it. Was anyone else coming along?

I mentioned earlier that I wanted to do this with a bow. It was at this point when I realized that maybe I had been a bit too optimistic. I was glad that we had brought the rifle along. The goat was in an unrecoverable spot where he was bedded . Our only hope was that we would be able to catch him up and feeding when we finally got to where he was.

Lunch was over and we bailed off the other side. I found an "easy" route down to the bottem. Judging from the others comments (whining) they thought differently. Its amazing what kind of incentive a little paper tag that says "valid for one either sex mountain goat" provides to the person that has it in their pocket.

 

[Gerald Martin]

I don't have any pictures of the stalk. We packed everything away for the climb down the mountain. When I got home I realized I didn't have any pictures or video of the bad stuff that we navigated through. Those were the times when both hands were needed. Here's one last picture from on top.

 

[Big Fin]

Wow, that is on the tough side, even for goat hunting.

 

[Lawnboy]

Hey Fin did you see what they were eating? Take notes I want some steak on the next hunt Great photos and hunt!! Thanks for sharing

 

[Gerald Martin]

We had made it down off the cliffs and were just getting ready to enter the timber in the bottem when Jr spotted another goat. The billy was bedded just 250 yards from us under an overhanging cliff. He was unaware of us and in the perfect location for a stalk. In fact I could have shot him right there with the rifle.

Unfortunately for me though this goat was nowhere nearly as big as the other billy. We judged him to be in the 8-8 1/2" range. He was a fairly young goat and not nearly as big in body as the other billys. In my mind I rejected him as a shooter immediately but looked at the others to confirm. "Not this one," was the unanimous consensus.

We got some good video and then left the goat undisturbed. I won't bore you with the details of the walk across the valley and the climb up the other side. It was mid afternoon when me reached crest of the ridge where we would be able to see the billy if he was where he had been bedded. He had been out of our sight for at least two hours now, he could be anywhere.

Our suspicions were confirmed when we glassed his bed. No billy. That was good and bad. Good because he was probably in a better spot for us to stalk and kill him, bad because he was just as likely to see us as we were him.

We were also realizing that the possibility of us spending the night on the mountain were very good.

Without many other options we started checking the different ridges and basins the goat could have fed into. There were at least four areas the goat could have went into. We wanted to be careful, but also cover ground as fast as possible.

In looking for the goat we commited the unpardenable. The goat was bedded in a small cluster of trees (I didn't think they were suppossed to do that), much like an alpine mule deer would do and caught us skylined.
Junior saw the goat(notice a pattern here?) just as the goat saw us. He alerted the rest of us and we stopped but the damage had been done. Here's the point where the unexpected happened. Everyone I had talked to said that goats were easy to approach. In fact some people think they are relitively stupid. I had the impression that even if a billy did see us he'd hang around long enough for us to get a shot. Aparently, this goat didn't get that memo. He bailed off the backside of the ridge and headed for the timber. We made our way over to where he was and picked up his tracks. He never stopped running till he hit the bottem and started the other side. He picked a chute that we couldn't see and headed for the top. In fact we could here him rolling rocks for a solid ten minutes, but try as we might we never could get to a spot where we could see him.

We made a half hearted attempt to follow him but gave up before long. We all knew that we'd never catch him before dark and we didn't want to be stuck in the cliffs overnight.

Some hard decisions had to be made. We were only 2 1/2 miles from camp but there were some major cliffs between us and we only had two hours before dark. It had taken us at least 6 hours of hiking to get where we were. We made the decision to try and find a flat spot and make a shelter. The weather looked good, we had plenty of clothes, water was available even though our supply of real food was lacking. We wouldn't be comfortable but we would be fine. Nobody liked the thought of hiking halfway through the night to make it back to camp.

Upon finding a somewhat level and protected site we prepared for the night. We cut fir boughs to sleep on and made a windbreak. There was fire killed lodgepole blowdown everywhere so we dragged half a dozen or more trees up for firewood. As night fell we kindled a fire and shared a meal of cheese and deer jerky. Last night we had T-bones, tonight four of us split two pieces of string cheese and half a bag of overdone jerky. From feast to near famine.

The night was long and hard (pun intended). We did stay pretty warm since everyone took it upon themselves to build up the fire each time they woke up. It seemed like the fire was stoked about every half hour.

Daylight arrived and we were up and ready to go. We split some granola bars and shared some of the chocolate that Kenneth's wife had sent with him. He didn't want to share but the threat of bodily injury plus us eating his share quickly changed his mind.

I wanted to make a quick check to see if the billy that we had spooked had come back into the drainage before we hiked out so Kenneth and I headed back up the mountain while Jr and Dave cleaned up our camp.

We couldn't see around very well so we turned and head back to the others. On our way back we ran into two blue grouse. BREAKFAST!!!!! Junior and Dave were about 300 yards from us. I didn't want to shoot them with my .325WSM so I whistled to Jr so he would bring my bow over to me. Through my sign language he got the message and he headed over.

The grouse shoot is a story in and of itself but lets keep it short and say that after a long chase and several shots I got one. We roasted a big male over the fire and ate him like cavemen. If this were a novel and I were a good writer I'd describe how alive we felt and how the natural juices flowed down our whiskery cheeks as we partook of natures bounty. I'd make it sound like a gourmet meal and all your stomachs would rumble as you imagined us eating this tender juicy morsel. I am not that writer. It sucked. That grouse was tough as shoe leather, charred on the outside, bloody on the inside, and tasted like old liver. We choked it all down though, because it was protein and was actually kind of filling once we got it down.

Over mouthfuls of foul, fool hen, we made plans for the rest of the day. We all agreed that the billy that we passed on the way over here might be worth looking for on our way out.

Of course that was not to be. During the morning he must have made tracks for another part of the county. We didn't see a thing until nearly 2 pm.

This time I spotted the goat first. He was nearly two miles away on the far ridgeline. We had no intentions of spending another night away from camp so we didn't really plan to go after him. It was then that we noticed he was working towards us, following a horse trail that led to the same divide we were headed for. We had to go halfway there anyway to get back to camp so we headed out.

As we started for the goat, we ate the last of our candy bars. Now here's the part where some of you might scoff. Do as you wish, but here's how it happened. Before we started again I decided that we needed some divine intervention on our behalf. We all knelt for a quick word of prayer, asking God to give us that goat, and then we started off. The divide trail was half way between us, we were going cross country and he was walking on the horse trail. We knew it would be tough to beat him to the pass.

I'll start another post so I don't run out of room.

 

[Gerald Martin]

I'll have to finish this in an hour or two. Daddy duties are calling. To be continued....

 

[Gerald Martin]

Here's some pictures of our camp that night and the view the next morning.

 

[Gerald Martin]

This picture is the best one I have for illustrating the hunt that is about to unfold. The red line is where we first saw the goat and his travel path, the yellow line is our path. We actually saw the goat a little further along our travel path than what this picture shows. Also there is a lot more terrain between us than is seen in this picture. At least it somewhat gives the scale of what we were dealing with.

 

[Gerald Martin]

We picked our way through the blowdowns as quickly as we could. Two legged humans with packs on, traveling cross country can nowhere match the speed of a four legged, mountain goat traveling a pack trail, but we were going to give it our best.

We covered half a mile in about thirty minutes and were relieved to see that the billy was still making his way towards us. Even better was the fact that he had slowed down and was looking over each side of the ridge as if he were trying to decide where he wanted to go. On our side of the ridge the terrain was pretty mild, on the other side there was nothing but sheer cliffs.

As we went around the last finger ridge that stood between us and the pass I finally thought we had a pretty good chance of catching him. The last time we had seen the goat he was at least 700 yards away and still coming our way.

We had to cross some open ground for us to get into range for a shot to the top. Jr. and Dave decided to hang back and try to video what they could, while Kenneth and I moved higher toward an ambush spot. We knew it was only a matter of time before the goat came over the top into the basin and we wanted to be waiting for him when he did.

We made our way up the ridge to a lone deadfall that looked like it would be in range of the top. The trunk made a perfect rest for me to prop my gun on if I took the shot from the prone position. I grabbed the rangefinder and shot some prominent land marks to see if I felt comfortable with the distance. My furtherest shot would be about 340 yards and it would probably be closer. My rest was dead steady and the goat was due to show anytime. The next nearest cover was a least 100 yards further up the mountain and I didn't think we could get there and get set up before the goat came into sight. I was confident that this was as good as it was going to get.

Kenneth got the camera into postition and was videoing me getting set up. We hadn't been there more than two minutes when the goat popped up over the skyline. It was a good thing we hadn't tried to go further, we'd have been caught in the open for sure.

The goat was still 400 yards from us so I had plenty of time to watch him as he walked along the ridge. It looked like I would have two options for my shot. I could wait until he walked straight above us and take the 320 yard shot or I could let him keep coming and maybe get a 200 yard shot. The only problem with the 200 yard shot was that due to the terrain I wouldn't be able to see him for nearly 100 yards as he went along the top. Another factor was that there was another ridge that joined the top from the backside of where the goat was. He could just as easily go down that ridge and right out of my life as he could keep going in the direction he was headed. Also because of the angle and the way the tree was laying I wouldn't be able to get a steady rest for the shorter shot.

I decided I was going to take the dead steady 320 yard shot. My Dad always taught me to take the first good shot. He would say if you wait for a perfect shot, you might not get any shot at all.

Finally the goat was as close as he was going to be before he went out of sight. Kenneth confirmed that he was on the goat. I waited until the goat turned broadside and stopped. I let out a long, slow breath and sssqueeezed the trigger. I heard the bullet strike and a huge cloud of dust flew from the rocks behind the billy. The billy crow hopped and took off running toward the crest of the ridge. Just before he made it over the top I sent a farewell shot his way, but I knew that one didn't connect.

I was positive that I had hit the goat on the first shot. The crosshairs had been dead steady, and the sight picture in my mind was good. I felt the adrenalin, that had been rushing through my veins, start at my brain and begin draining away like a just flushed commode. I was tingling and shaking all over. I had to close my eyes and lean back against the tree to compose myself as reality started sinking in.

Jubilation and apprehension shared equal place in my heart. A quick look at the video confirmed that my first shot had hit the goat and my second had missed. Jubilation. I knew that unless that goat was laying dead in a depression or had caught on an unseen boulder he had made it into the sheer cliffs of the other side. Apprehension. What would it be? Would the goat be laying on the trail or scattered in little bitty pieces at the bottom of a cliff?

Jr. and Dave caught up to us and after some congratulations and excitement we headed for the top. What would we find on the other side?

 

[Big Fin]

Man, you are dragging this one out. Waiting for the next chapter. Very cool so far.

 

[WV Hunter]

I got to see how this ends..