Sept 2010 Mountain Goat Hunt ( Pic Heavy)

[Gerald Martin]

Some of you may recall me posting in other threads that my boss DJ drew a goat and a ram tag this past fall. After a dreary sloppy day of rain and slush my mind was drawn to better weather and goats on the cliffs. I thought I'd share some pictures of the hunt and a little commentary.

The hunt took place in late Sept. This unit gets snowed in early so we didn't want to risk hunting past Mid Oct. He also wanted to kill his goat so he could concentrate on looking for a ram.

DJ's two brother drove out from PA to join us. Camp was 5 1/2 miles from the trail head.

I've already typed out a longer story but after loosing it once, I'm going to let the pictures do most of the talking.

 

[Gerald Martin]

We didn't see any goats on the first day. We hit the sack early with expectations of seeing goats on the surrounding cliffs in the morning. We had enough food to stay at least a week and more back at the truck if need be. We were going to spend a couple days in this camp and if necessary hike another three miles in if we didn't find the goats.


While sitting in camp and glassing the next morning I happened to glance up at a little saddle about 3/4 of a mile above camp. I was postitive I saw something white moving past a tree but before I could get the scope on it it was gone. That established the direction we wanted to head for the day so we threw our packs on and headed out.

After several hours we got to where I thought I had seen the goats and found fresh tracks. The goats were not to be seen however and we started checking over each little ridge top and ravine to try and find where they had gone. It was nearly noon and we were taking a break in a small patch of trees when DJ's brother Merle spotted this goat 600 yards away from us.
We quickly confirmed it was a billy in the 8-9" range. DJ had made it clear beforehand that he was only interested in a decent billy. He wasn't going to try and hold ouf for a monster. He said the goat looked big enough for him. Now we just had to close the distance. We had no cover other than where we were sitting and the goat was feeding away from us. We watched as he went from 600 yards out to 800 yards and over the top of the mountain.

Did we want to try and follow or circle around to another saddle in hopes of spottingt the goat on the other side of the mountain? I've got a little experience hunting goats and know its usually futile to try and catch up to a goat once he is moving on the cliffs. We wisely chose to head up to the saddle and hope the goat came our way.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Just before we made it to the saddle we looked back to where we had come from only to see this goat run right past where we had been sitting. I'm pretty sure it was one of the ones I had seen that morning. It was spooked and bailed down the spine of the ridge the last time I saw it it was a couple hundred yards from our camp in the bottom and headed for the other side of the valley.

Mountain goats don't have a reputation for being spooky but let me assure you that the ones in the units that are hunted heavily don't let you get by with much. I'm pretty sure this goat was either a nanny or a small billy as he didn't look as big as the goat we were after.

 

[Gerald Martin]

We made it to the saddle and sat down to glass the other side. There was no goat in sight and a shear cliff for nearly 800 yards in the direction where we had last seen the goat. There was no way we would have been able to follow that billy.
We sat there and glassed for about half an hour when our goat reappeared. He was skylined on a huge boulder at the top of the cliff. He was 1010 yards by the rangefinder and he may as well have been on the moon. There was no way we could get there from here.

We were enjoying the sight when the goat started picking his way down a chute. Eventually he was on our level and started making his way toward us. Nobody wanted to get their hopes up because there were a lot of other places he could go and he needed to cover at least 500 yards before we could even attempt to make a move on him.

After the goat messed around for another half an hour and covered 200 yards in our direction I started taking notice of the situation. He was staying exactly on our level and we were sitting in the only saddle on this mountain. This just might work out!

 

[Sytes]

All I can say is ... INTENSE! Thanks for sharing!

 

[schmalts]

more please I am probably waaay different than most here in the fact that i want to draw a goat tag more than a sheep tag someday. great story so far, although there should be a law against drawing a goat and sheep tag in the same state in the same year!

 

[Gerald Martin]

Due to the terrain if the goat did come all the way around to us, he was going to be out of our sight from about 150 yards out until he was within 50 yards. If things continued the way it looked like they would the goat was intending to come within ten yards of where we now sat. There was a 40 ft cliff directly to our right and the saddle was only about 20 yards wide where it met the mountainside.

Previously I had tried to stress to DJ how tough that goats can be. I shot mine in 2007 and watched him cliff up after I made a bad shot on him. I had to shoot him again and watch him fall 350 feet. That was something I wanted to avoid at all costs for DJ's goat.

I realized that our best option for killing this goat in an easily recoverable place was to move back about 50 yards from where we were now sitting and try and wait until the goat was on top of the saddle before shooting him. That would give us a 30yard margin of safety before the goat could make it back to the cliffs. I think its the only time I've ever purposely gotten further from an animal in setting up a shot.

Long story short.... After nearly two hours the goat read our script perfectly and came up onto the saddle just 50 yards from us. He was still down over the edge a bit more than I liked when he stopped and put his nose into the wind. Looking back at the video I now realize he was just testing the air from the other side of the canyon before commiting to coming over the top, but at the time we thought he might have been smelling where we had been despite us having the wind in our favor.

The goat was quartering heavily towards us but DJ thought he could put the bullet through him lengthwise. He wasn't waiting any longer and said he was taking the shot. I got the camera zoomed back onto the goat and gave him the go ahead.

That's when things fell apart......


Hindsight being 20/20 and all that stuff there's a few things that were nagging in my mind just before the shot but I pushed them aside. The biggest thing was due to our settup DJ was shooting from a sitting positon with his elbows propped on his knees. It has crossed my mind while we were watching the goat come in that I should have insisted on him getting one of our backpacks to rest across.... but I didn't want to be pushy. It was his hunt, his tag, and he is my boss. Plus he felt confident he could make the shot.

The other thing I didn't realize at the time was his mental image of the goat's body posture was different than the goat was actually standing. A white goat is kind of like a black bear in that its hard to determine angle and body posture when you don't have a broadside profile and legs to use as reference points.

Add a healthy dose of adrenaline and a touch of buck fever and what happened next is what I did not want to see. At the shot the goat whirled and ran back to the edge of the cliffs. The goat paused briefly at the edge before going over and I emphatically don't DJ,, "Don't shoot!" I knew we could run to the edge and see the goat again and I didn't want the goat to fall off the cliff.

At that point we both thought the hit was good and ran over to the edge expecting to see a dead goat. Instead there was DJ's goat heading back the way he came, limping badly and in a spot where he could fall over a hundred feet if DJ shot him again.

DJ's brothers came running over to us and when they saw what was happening, Linford ran back to get a pack for DJ to use as a rest. The goat saw the commotion and made the connection as to what was the cause of his pain. He was starting to make pretty good time across the rocks and was now about 200 yards away.
Fortunately for us, the further the goat got from us the better the terrain was for recovery. By then DJ was braced across a pack and one more shot put the goat down for good. The billy slid and tumbled for about thirty yards down the mountain, but thankfully did not freefall.

It all ended well but the moral of the story is always, always get a dead rest if you have time, even if you think its a chip shot.


The goat came from the far side of this mountain, all the way over to our side.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Schmalts, when you draw I'm your pack mule . I've even got a spotting scope you can borrow.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Goat Down! Now we just have to get down to him. Here's some pics from that moment.

 

[Gerald Martin]

As we got to looking about how to get to the goat we suddenly realized it was nearly two o'clock. We had been getting ready to eat before we first saw this goat and now everyone was ravenous. A quick fire and some chunky potato soup hit the spot!

 

[Gerald Martin]

I doctored this picture to show the path the goat took until we shot him. The red dot on the right side is where we first saw him on this side of the mountain and the white "goat" is where DJ shot him.

 

[Gerald Martin]

When we got to the goat we took lots of hero shots. Here's a few.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Skinning a goat out for a lifesize mount and butchering on a rock the size of a small table is a royal pain in the keister. But the rest of the mountain was steep enough we couldn't keep the goat from sliding. This is the rock where I worked the goat up.

 

[Gerald Martin]

After working the goat up there was nothing to do but go back up the mountain with our loads. We packed the goat about two miles back around the top of the rim. We cached the meat, hide and all nonessential gear we were carrying on top of the pass. We'd have to come back this trail the next day on our way out.

The next morning we broke camp and headed for the top. We added the goat and our other gear to already heavy packs and plodded to the truck. I prefer not to remember that part.

 

[Gerald Martin]

While not a monster, DJ's goat was a very respectable 4 1/2 year old billy. The horns were 8 1/4 inches long and I don't even know if we took a circumfrance measurement. DJ was thrilled with his goat, his brothers had a great time and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Here's a few parting scenery shots.

I didn't get many more pictures once the work began.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Now its back to waiting for another friend to draw the tag and dreaming about maybe drawing it again myself. Only four more years before I can appy again!

 

[----]

Another awesome goat write up Gerald, thanks.

 

[Big Fin]

Great story, Gerald. I'm sitting in a hotel lobby in Indy, surrounded by the concrete jungle. That story was an amazing read, reminding me why I live where I do, and not in places of human masses.

 

[1_pointer]

Great story, thanks!! Those goat hunts sure make a memory. They are much more fun in hindsite than they are in real-time...

What's Hondo packing the dog-leg for?

 

[trevore]

Thanks for sharing. Great story. That goat has some good hair, will make a fine mount.