Nanny Problems - Oh Yeah, I’ve Got Them (a goat hunt)

Dsnow9

Well-known member
Joined
Oct 29, 2019
Messages
3,456
Location
Colorado
This hunt starts back to application season when @wllm1313 and I discussed applying for 3rd and 4th season nanny tags in the same unit, respectively. I figured… I can’t tell the difference anyway so why wait another 10-15 years to hunt mountain goat.

Well the draw came up and I was the lucky recipient of a fourth season Colorado nanny tag. I immediately called my wife and believe the call went something like this… Me: Where would you like to go on vacation? Wife: As a family? Me: No, by yourself or a friend, whatever you want to do. Wife: What the fu(& did you do now…………. Me: I drew the mountain goat tag. Wife: You owe me so big, you manifested that crap, you have been saying you were going to draw since the day you applied.

2021 was already scheduled to be very busy for us with only one long weekend of free time not already scheduled between tag draw and the goat hunt. That long weekend was also our tenth anniversary. So what did this guy do? Pack up the camper and take the family on a 5 day anniversary camping trip in the goat unit.

It was an amazing time away with my wife and 2 girls, five and one. It was not a scouting trip full of the multiple hikes and drives this genius had thought he could get away with. Anyone with young kids knows that nap times, meals, and bumpy car rides can put a wrench in the schedule.
 
Throughout the five days we took a nice drive up to the top of a drainage.

D06E70DA-E1F6-44BD-87CB-1E75AFF910DE.jpegAEB29AFF-BC5B-4FC6-86E6-3C81E646856F.jpeg
We also were able to make it up one very steep but not to long of a hike. It was an area that other hunters had previously harvested goats and looked like a great place to have a picnic. We had a blast and my five year old made the whole hike up herself. We even got to see goats along the ridge right before we left, but wasn’t able to get a picture.
23F73BFA-4AEC-485E-B808-35D4DB9B9348.jpegE79F4AAC-9070-412E-BBE5-ADD8EA219FAF.jpegC0206A6F-A7BE-4924-90D6-87574FA40BE1.jpeg2257DBF2-90B8-428E-8911-4AF5F2D24BCE.jpeg
 
As the summer went on I found out that @LuketheDog had a friend with an earlier season nanny tag in the same unit and shared some valuable information that @wllm1313 worked some magic on. Thank you both! That helped me greatly with the e-scouting portion and putting some plans together.

As the season rolled around I decided to pick up a leftover 1st season elk tag since I didn’t draw in order to hunt with my hunting partner. He was fully committed to my goat hunt but wasn’t going to come till after his elk hunt. Well, the elk hunt was a bust. Lots of hard miles, sub par shooting conditions, elk lower than we expected, and confusing private boundaries beat us this year.

The reason I say that is because the seasons overlapped. The first elk season ended Wednesday. And we had almost 50 miles on our boots when we pulled out of the driveway Wednesday night and headed for a campsite we were not sure if we could make it to.
D5DA8FDD-C596-4B38-B510-6CDCE1DF4AFC.jpeg

We rolled into camp just about 11pm. Threw the boxes and coolers out and climbed into the bed of the truck with the topper. A short night sleep and we were up and out of the truck and hiking at first light (or close to it). We started hiking up the road in a goat unit that in 1st-3rd season is basically a drive to the top and to each new basin till you find the goats. We weren’t a mile out of camp before the snow drifts closed the road right at tree line. We made it to the top of the ridge and started to glass.

166E7FBC-02A7-4A72-A132-D5913A0F8A1A.jpeg7008E717-E670-45E9-80E8-9B330C4B67B5.jpeg9BD19E03-2EB0-4DFA-BFED-B27054361CF4.jpeg
 
This was Thursday, the fourth day of the season. The season ran two weeks, but only during the week days because of recreational use. So we had two days to hunt, then two scouting days, and then five more days of hunting.

We thought we spotted a group of goats about a mile and a half away across the ridge and decided to make the trek.
DC46C046-D1B0-4A17-A83F-372733FEA60F.jpeg
We may or may not have hiked from where this photo was taken to somewhere in the right third of the photo and over the ridge in 10-12” of wind blown snow all to find out we likely didn’t see anything but some rocks because we did not find any tracks in the snow.

Lesson learned: do not hike after goats until you confirm they are goats with the spotter.
 
Here is where I should note that my hunting partner lost a little wager earlier in the year and had to carry my rifle anytime I needed this hunting season. I figured I might as well bring the bow because everyone I talked to that had hunted this unit before said that I shouldn’t need my rifle. (None of them had hunted 4th season)
69DD7626-BC24-487D-81D6-3F37ECFF8F5A.jpegE5CBB7B2-8F3F-4F21-8C1A-58F221C2D7BF.jpeg
We were trying to decide which of two ridges to run out to finish the night and I decided that the one that could drop into camp was the better option if we had to bail off or were lucky enough to find goats. We came over the fourth peak on the ridge that seemed like it would never end and saw an old mining cabin.
96A09B40-9DC4-4F7B-9EFD-8649776D4621.jpeg
The mining cabin appeared to be the local watering hole for goats. There were fresh tracks everywhere from multiple goats of all sizes. We were so excited! We followed the tracks along the ridge for a bit and then could not tell the difference between fresh and day old tracks when the snow was gone.
 
We walked another two peaks and took a break. Defeated and watching the daylight disappear, we were getting ready to make the trek back to camp. Finn, my hunting partner, who is about 15 years younger than I am and has a newish serious relationship was busy texting away during our break. I was glassing away, not ready to give up, when he pops his binos up from texting for 2 seconds and asks: “What about those tracks?”

I seriously thought he was screwing with me. No way he finds tracks 2 seconds after having his head buried in his phone. Well, he wasn’t, sure enough there were a dozen or so tracks leading down the snow out to a point just below the cabin. We back tracked and started following the tracks.
7A5C8FF0-5CAB-4D0A-B6DB-6F9C4A6DE3F2.jpeg
We made it out of the snow and into a grassy patch on the west facing slope. We glassed for what seemed like forever, following tracks in and out of the snow below us. We didn’t see any tacks and we’re starting to come to the conclusion that they had to be somewhere below us. All of a sudden little white puff balls started appearing.
D34E6822-6C64-4D88-9AE3-152636882573.jpeg85011808-7EC4-431F-8EE9-7061E66BB896.jpeg148EFCC6-B5E8-4057-808D-8C7AA6DF60DD.jpeg09C251DB-B2FC-48DE-A42C-E4B1FE6CFB29.jpeg
 
Finn, give me my rifle. As we sat there in the wind with all these goats between 50 and 75 yards away, all of those gender tests, photos, and videos I watched all seemed like child’s play. My confidence in determining the difference between a mature nanny and the young billies in the group was not high. The last thing I wanted to do was screw up and shoot a billy on my nanny tag. This “billy” gave us the stare down for about three minutes.05C56C91-9615-4C3E-9FF5-C4BCBD99A1E9.jpeg
After all the research I had done with goat reproductive cycles I wanted to kill a mature nanny without a yearling kid and at this point in the hunt we were basically waiting for them to pee.

I know, I should have spent more time up close with the goats to figure out gender but then my hunt and story would end here.
 
We finally saw the nanny with the patches of old hair that was all matted pee but then never had a clean shot. The young billy was in front of her or the kids were behind her, and with the wind I wasn’t going to try and sneak an arrow or bullet in there. I wanted a clean shot because they were sitting right on top of a cliff. We called the one that we saw patches because of her matted hair. There was another with two chunks of hair missing or something but we were still lacking confidence and passed on the one in the video below because we hadn’t seen her pee.


Then as we sat there, freezing in the wind, rifle trained on the nanny we had picked out, one of the kids ran through the herd and spooked them.

 
After the kids spooked the herd they moved over into a small avalanche shoot between two cliffs. I made the mistake of moving quickly to get in position for a shot on the one we determined was ok to shoot. As I moved they took off like nothing I have ever seen before across the rocks, cliffs, and everything in between. As we ran around the corner to see if they had stopped they were 800 yards away and still moving across the large bowl. We decided we would hike straight down to the road and back to camp because the distance was less than half of going back along the ridge.

I should have looked through all my photos and videos closely and realized that there were only two billies in the group of 13 and another that appeared a minute after that whole herd left from way below. He ended up watching us as we hiked out with our heads hanging low but ecstatic at the same time. We found goats, got within 50 yards, and then didn’t feel like we could ethically shoot one!
 
We walked all the way along the ridge, passed the old mining cabin and kept going.
7F3E3EA6-B84A-413D-8BC8-4AE74276E906.jpeg
We came over the last peak and looked over the edge. “Are you kidding me?” There were the tracks, only problem was we had about 100 yards of very steep, boarder line cliffs to get down so we could see where the tracks led. We made it down and looked over the edge and there was the billy that watched us walk to camp his perch on the rock the night before.
Didn’t get a pic of him but here was the view.
A3C29D47-76A7-4880-B053-390EF68461E0.jpeg42B728A8-4994-44DF-8891-316CDBC0746E.jpeg19AC0AFB-424E-4E80-B005-57F549ABF879.jpeg
Knowing there was no way to safely get down to the next cliff ban, I made the call and we bailed out. It was steep!
F60082B7-638D-484D-8F2E-DD39636AF42E.jpegAD94CFF7-E4C3-47B6-96B8-864F2B7E4A64.jpeg
If you didn’t notice, I gave up on the bow. We decided Finn would carry the spotter and tripod and I would carry the rifle, it felt like we might be doing a lot of hiking and we were right.
 
After getting back to camp we made a drive over to the bottom of the cliffs in order to try and track down the goats. We had to do a little creek crossing.


We glassed all afternoon but didn’t come up with anything but a cow moose and her two calves.

51223D56-5BDC-4365-A525-B5B28D9BEB97.jpeg63C69AB4-4013-4D34-B284-5A6D117C53D5.jpeg
After coming back across the creek we stopped to talk to some campers that had just showed up and cheered us on for crossing the creek. I was mid conversation, talking about mountain goat hunting and hunting in general with this nice couple when Finn pops his head up from his phone again, throws up his binos from the truck, and spots a group of goats half way up the hill.

We had 20 minutes till shooting light was over. Apologized to the couple but said we had to leave now. We went full baja down the road about a half mile and pulled the truck off the road, barely. We then went full crazy person and covered almost 400 vertical feet in .2 miles all in less than ten minutes. We got within 300 yards of the goats. I was prone laying on my pack, with my feet perched against a rock so I didn’t slide down the hill. I had a clear shot on one but it was on the edge of a cliff and we didn’t have enough light to see the horns well, even if I was confident in my goat gender identification. Friday night ended and it was time for our two days of scouting since we could not hunt on the weekends. We drove about 2 hours to the other side of the unit and arrived around ten after grabbing a bite to eat in town. Boxes and coolers out of the truck and back to sleep in the truck bed.
 
So… reality starts to set in that I told @LuketheDog, @wllm1313, and Finn that I wanted to enjoy this hunt and didn’t want it to be over the first day. We both slept in a bit because we had been averaging 10 miles a day fir a week straight at this point.
C2EE872C-3E95-4F53-B020-96B4673282B4.jpeg
Finn was reluctant to get out of the truck as he knew I would start hiking as soon as he was out. We had a pretty mellow 4.5 mile hike into a new basin and got some cool pictures and saw way to many people. I guess the no weekend hunting made sense.
4DFC0D29-F6EF-499A-A3B1-C607272F0CDC.jpegEB850E54-0B2D-4F0D-9C3F-C1864B41AF68.jpeg4568F287-E9A7-43DD-A503-D5F9198EB3E8.jpeg07BE6789-3E51-453F-A752-A833AC07D14B.jpeg44D28A86-121C-4DAD-88B1-37205E88F9D1.jpeg25A1FE2B-AB05-4C77-8897-4ADD7B72AA90.jpeg4B37DF7D-AF9D-4F5E-8816-DDFD072F35FA.jpeg037ACFFC-D648-4ED6-9213-F311110FFCBC.jpeg
 
As we sat on a cliff mid way up the basin and glassed every snow patch for tracks or goats we only saw one set of tracks and they were a few days old. I decided it wasn’t worth hanging out there all day, to many people. We bailed out, drove about an hour to the NE corner of the unit and I decided it was time to go scout the area I had hiked with my girls.
D3C33186-F9CF-41AC-AD08-DB92B94D3BA6.jpegA644A9A6-402B-47DF-BBE6-0CAE5F85B2B8.jpegE64FFD24-42F3-4B5B-BD3A-C4ADE795EC0A.jpegF4E7BD9E-D149-454B-B197-6FEF5AA170A0.jpeg
We made it to where we had a picnic as a family, and goats started appearing over the ridge. Lots of big goats.
 
This is where the gender identification gets even more embarrassing. There was a group of goats feeding lower that we were unsure about but they were so big we figured billies. Then two actual billies did the billy thing and popped out at the very top of the mountain to check on the world below.44A9C159-02ED-45B6-8092-5B3E75DD94E3.jpeg8924152E-AC73-4179-A6F5-EA4E0835EE3C.jpeg5E28A47D-B549-4042-8FDB-0E30F8663FCF.jpeg
We decided we wanted to work up the valley a little more and see if there were more around the corner and get a little closer to mess up the gender again…
 
Back
Top