329 Goat Tag Filled

One quick question, what's a krummholz pine tree?
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What MarvB said. Krummholz is German for twisted or crooked wood. I was too intent on the goat to notice if it was a whitebark pine or subalpine fir or what exactly.
 
Awesome hunt. I love the road pic--looks like a relaxing spot. Congratulations on the goat!
 
Cav1 said:
Just a quick write-up of my mountain goat hunt in #329. Thanks to all the Hunt-Talkers who were kind enough to exchange info and offer advice, to Theat in particular, who really knew the area and the goats. I actually met two more Hunt-Talkers on the ground, one while scouting and one while hunting.

Most of all thanks to my friend Geetar. His passion for checking out and trying the #500 Unlimited Bighorn District led me to join his scouting trip there last summer and rediscovering that country. He returned the favor by coming along on my mountain goat hunt. I think he was about as excited over catching some nice cutthroat trout as I was over my goat. I’m looking forward to chasing sheep with him in the future.

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The Boulder River Road was every bit as bad as I remembered it.

The hunt itself was almost anti-climactic. Getting into and out of sheep country under our own power was the big adventure/ordeal. Suffice to say we covered a whole lot of miles horizontally and feet of altitude vertically and I was really glad I had had my boots resoled recently. We didn’t need to do any technical climbing or anything, but one pitch was so steep I skinned my nose walking up it.

The goat I got was not the old-timer I was looking for and just over 8 inches, but I’m still very happy with him and feel like he was the one I was meant to get the way everything just fell perfectly into place. Four days previously while scouting I had watched a big old yellowish billy who moved like an old man up above the lake from 4 miles away with the spotter from Baboon Mountain. By the time we came back for the hunt on the 14th, the drift smoke from the forest fires further west had settled in so thickly that we could not even see Baboon Mountain itself from the lake. Even with poor glassing conditions we saw plenty of goats but very little other wildlife.

My goat was bedded on a flat rock in a little clump of three krummholz pine above the lake where we camped and the glimpses I got of him through the spotter had me thinking his horns stacked up pretty good compared to the length of his face, but somehow all horns and antlers just seem bigger when they’re on the mountain. We had ranged some features up and down the mountain so I knew if I could get to an intervening rock ridge unseen it would put me within 300-400 yards of him.

View attachment 155015

I made it up there and paused behind a boulder the size of my living room to catch my breath, clean my glasses and optics, and range the ribbon cliff I knew he was at the edge of at 380 yards. I shucked off my pack and got into a good prone position with the shooting sling tight on my support arm and then just inched ahead on my belly and elbows until I could see the goat through my 2.5-10x40 Nikon P-5. He was still bedded and almost 300 feet higher so I had no shot. But even though I was nothing more to him than a muzzle, scope lens, hat brim and forearm peeking out from an over-hanging rock, I figured he’d see me pretty quick and he did. In well under two minutes he got to his feet and looked down at me, giving me a standing broadside shot.

My mind had registered the fact that I could no longer feel any cross breeze on my cheek so I didn’t have to worry about windage and I held the appropriate range mark on the BDC a tad low to take into account the uphill angle and a goat’s bottom heavy build. Everything about the shot just felt good as I squeezed the Timney trigger on my Remington 700 but for a moment I wondered if I had somehow missed as the goat, true to form, never registered even the slightest visible flicker or reaction in response to the shot.

Several hundred dry-fires with Snap-Caps paid off as I worked the bolt smartly and instinctively while keeping my eye on the target. We later found out the first 212-grain Hornady ELD-X out of the .30-06 had completely shattered both front shoulders. The two follow-up shots were a double-lung through-and-through hit of the ribcage behind the shoulder and one that broke the spine above and behind the shoulders, although I’m not sure in what order. In spite of all that, he managed to get in a couple of kicks that sent him over the edge of the rock ledge he was bedded on, which led to a short slide and roll to a grassy area just below. At that point he was a big white lump from my vantage point, but I could see the neck still struggling to lift the head so I fired my last shot center mass of the lump, down through the liver it turned out.

Despite all this, he gave one last heave that sent him downhill in a shower of sliding stones and a cloud of dust. By pure dumb luck he rolled to a halt on a small flat grassy bench and didn’t move again. If he’d have gone six inches further it would have been enough to send him down another hundred feet or so onto a jumble of rocks. After I climbed up to him and made sure he was dead, the first thing I did was to tie a rope around one leg and dally it to the trunk of the nearest stunted but sturdy-looking fir tree.

I only had to ascend about 300 feet, with a detour around a steep field of loose scree rock, but Geetar purt near beat me to the goat. He'd been watching from camp and made the 800 foot climb from the lake faster than I could believe to help with photographing, field dressing, and packing out the goat. The last 20 minutes to camp had to be made with headlamps.

View attachment 155071
I think Geetar was about as excited about his first cutthroats as I was about my goat.

Supper was an 18-1/2-inch cutthroat Geetar had caught baked in tinfoil and goat heart cooked in similar fashion, both of which were excellent. The chunks of goat tenderloin and backstrap seared over the fire caveman-style left a bit to be desired. As Geetar politely put it, they shouldn’t be your first choice for introducing someone to wild game meat.

But the atmosphere was perfect as the drift smoke was clearing rapidly and the stars came out in all their glory above the dark rims of the cliffs that surrounded the lake on three sides.
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Thanks for sharing!
 
Super!

I loved the comments on the dining quality. The trophy is the friendship, views, sense of accomplishment and perhaps lots of well doctored sausage.
 
I took a summer over-nighter into Elk Lake exactly 27 years ago, just to go fishing. I had an old copy of Pat Marcuson's Fishing the Beartooths and I took it as a challenge when I read the directions to Elk Lake: "Approximately 8 trail miles from the trailhead, if you can find it, from the Boulder River Road, if you can find it..." I had also had a 10-year-old A-B Wilderness map that showed a trail along the north side of Elk Creek. I learned the hard way and after the fact that the trail had been taken out of the USFS system years before, but I made it to the lake. That was many years and pounds and wrecks ago, of course. I see the latest FWP Mountain Lakes Guide has a report from an angler who recently tried that route and it took him 11 hours.

The recommended route these days is "6 miles up Copper Creek Trail #15 to West Boulder Divide and then 2 miles north along the divide." Some decent user-made trails along the ridge, which at times skirts some impressive sheer cliffs that dive down the Copper Creek headwall, but Geetar's OnX tracker put the actual mileage we covered at 3 miles. Dropping into and getting out of the lake basin from the ridge top starts or ends the journey with a real butt-kicker: 500 feet of elevation in a quarter mile. It didn't help that I kept stepping on my tongue.

IMG_3328.JPG
 
Gotta love those non existant trails, sometimes just have to make your own.. Great looking pic of geetar, just a little smoky!!:sneaky:
 
Great story. Some cool country that I have not traversed for almost 20 years. Congrats to both of you.
 
Hey there buddy! I just stumbled upon this adventure because I was looking for your forum name in some conversations I'd had with Geetar. I'd watched a YouTube video earlier this evening that recorded an unlimited sheep hunt in 502 this past season. Hunter mentioned his home and I could not remember whence you hail--wondered if the hunter was you. However, I now realize he's about a generation and a half too young.

Congratulations on the billy. You wrote quite the entertaining story there pal. The skinned nose phrase was particularly evocative :LOL:!

My experience hunting Mountain goats is almost as extensive as my Bighorn ram hunting career and the tally is identical = one reasonably mature male critter. So, from that impressive perspective, I have to say that all one hears of the tenacity of Mountain goats is evidently true.

As to the gastronomical quality, I found the flesh quite palatable in flavor. I am convinced, however, that one who had to survive for an extended duration, say three weeks, on nothing but the meat of Oreamnos americanus would surely perish. Granted, it normally requires longer than that for a healthy adult to starve to death; but one can die of fatigue, especially if one persists in attempting to extract surplus calories from goat meat to those expended in the chewing.
 
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