We don't have a dedicated goat hunting forum so I figured I'd post my writeup here since mountain goat hunting is probably most similar to sheep.
Just returned from a short fly out trip on the lower Chilkat peninsula, approximately 25 miles northwest of Juneau, AK. We were delayed a day waiting for the ceiling to lift but that's pretty typical for southeast Alaska. The lake we had planned for was still stacked up with clouds after the first day so we ended up pivoting to one that was closer and might have better weather for the week.
We got dropped off in the early afternoon at around 1600 feet of elevation and followed the path of a small meltwater stream uphill to a nearby cirque and made camp there for the night while glassing the nearby ridgelines between clouds.
The following morning was fairly cloudy but we decided to make our way up the left side of the peak seen top right in the above picture and work our way down the ridgeline that skirted our bowl and ran south with several other ridges protruding perpendicular to the east. We figured the steep exposed faces of the perpendicular ridges might hold billies and the north/south ridge seemed quite manageable.
Luckily for us, as we were ascending the chute/scree slope a goat decided to come investigate the racket (probably wondering what all our cursing was about) and popped his head over the peak/ridge off to our right.
I was above my hunting partner and had the more parallel shot so I readied my rifle and she managed to get a picture as I was setting up. He briefly wandered away as I worked my way towards an area flat enough to where I could have free hands to shoot but fortunately came right back to check us out again and presented me with a lovely quartered away shot that I took at what I'm guessing was about 200 yards, as there was too much water in the air for my rangefinder to work.
The shot went through the crease and the shoulder joint on the opposite side before coming to rest beneath the far side hide. He dropped where he stood and as goats are wont to do kept dropping, and dropping, and dropping, before coming to rest in the snow at the bottom of our cirque, less one horn that was never recovered.
After quick congratulations and a round of thanks to the goat we butchered him on the snow before dragging the meat to the far side of the snow field and burying it in the snow wrapped in a tarp.
At this point my hunting partner was even more excited to get one of her own (understandably so given it would be her first) so we packed back up and headed out along our originally planned course.
We made camp on the backside of the first perpendicular ridge in a spot with good viewshed of the cliffs on the second and third ridges before heading out for an evening scouting expedition. Seemingly every knoll or clump of rock would start clucking as we drew close and after spotting the first ptarmigan we could usually make out truly improbable numbers of them. Part of me wished for a slingshot and part of me was glad to not have the temptation to add weight to my pack.
We made it as far as the third ridge before turning around and it was on the way back, around 7pm, when I spotted a second billy approximately 1850 yards distant from my perch on the spine of the second ridge. A hair over a mile as the crow flies doesn't seem much until you're on rough terrain after a long day with heavy packs so it was only after some spirited discussion that I conceded that we could give chase with the agreement that we would gut and skin and come back to finish the following day if we were successful.
We caught glimpses of him again at 1600, 900, and then again 700 yards. The adrenaline from the initial sighting draining just as the excitement of getting close began to build. As we crept over the ridge at 700 a cloud blew through obscuring our vision and by the time it had cleared he was gone. Hearts in our chests, we hiked out to the ridge he had just been on, hoping to catch a glimpse of where he'd gone. We were able to check that he hadn't snuck beneath us on the cliff side below our ridgeline and he wasn't anywhere on the near side of the ridge. With trepidation we moved to the far side of the ridge and lo and behold, our goat was meandering along a bench some 200 yards below us having acquired a friend (who appeared to be another billy). I was nervous about their location but there was no dissuading my friend from taking the shot so we set up and I got in position to spot for her. The first shot out of her great-grandfathers trusty Model 70 (in 270 Win) caught him a little far back. I called out a hit and told her to adjust right a foot but he was already racing downhill as his friend looked towards us with a confused expression and slowly trotted away. We cursed and rushed, half sliding, half running, to the next bench down where he had been before the shot and peered over the edge. A follow up shot went through high on the front shoulder and out through the joint on the other side and, of course, he tumbled further down the bowl.
We reached him about 15 minutes later and had just enough time to gut and partially skin him and make it up to the rim of the bowl before night fell. We made the trudge back to camp with lamps on our heads and smiles on our faces.
The following day was probably the most grueling, as we had to finish field dressing the goat and hike him out of the bowl and across the ridgeline to a patch of snow in a swale on the ridge above the lake. The 1000 vertical feet back to where he was when he was shot were the hardest.
We managed to surprise a somewhat scraggly solo wolf coming over a hill and from that point on would encounter his tracks at nearly every patch of snow on our way back to camp.
At some point on our trudge back we realized we wouldn't have time to ferry all of the meat to the takeout before our scheduled pickup and so we made the decision to use an alternate route to drop the second goat down at the lakeshore. Much as I'm loathe to deviate from a known good route, this one looked good from the satellite with maybe one excessively steep section along the river path we intended to follow.
We made good time down, eventually reaching a section some 400 vertical feet above the lake where our route was interrupted by a 30 foot waterfall. We tied off our packs one at a time and lowered them down before picking our way unencumbered down the edge and retrieving them. The whole maneuver took about an hour but even still the alternative route saved us maybe half a day over following the ridges back up and over the way we had come.
We hiked back up to the ridge and took our camp equipment across and down to the cache where we'd left the first goat, discovering that the wolf we had been following on and off had pulled the hide off of the meat but hadn't disturbed any of the bags of meat. Instead it looked like he had settled for the pelvis off of the goats nearby carcass.
We were able to ferry the second load of meat down to the lake that night and went to sleep knowing we had only to pack out our camping equipment before our morning flight out. As we nursed our rehydrated dinners, having spent two full days packing the second goat across miles of rugged mountaintop, we were treated to the sight of another billy slowly meandering not 400 yards from where we'd made camp the first night, seemingly content with the knowledge that we were tired and our tags already filled.
Our pilot was fortunately grudgingly willing to pick up both us and goat #1 from the spot they had dropped us off and goat #2 from the other corner of the lake and after circling the lake to give us the maximum possible take off distance our plane lifted off and we were on our way home.
Pertinent information: we both had over the counter resident tags for goats of either gender. Because I'm a hypebeast/gearhead the rifle is one I assembled on a defiance action chambered in 7 Sherman Short and the bullet was a 155gr Hammer Hunter with an impact velocity around 2850 fps. My hunting partner used a pre-1964 Winchester Model 70 chambered in .270 Winchester loaded with 130gr Barnes TTSX and had an estimated impact velocity of 2480 fps. Flights were around $900 round trip from Juneau, although they would be slightly cheaper if we hadn't gotten anything since they could have flown us back in the Cessna 206 rather than the DeHavilland Beaver
Just returned from a short fly out trip on the lower Chilkat peninsula, approximately 25 miles northwest of Juneau, AK. We were delayed a day waiting for the ceiling to lift but that's pretty typical for southeast Alaska. The lake we had planned for was still stacked up with clouds after the first day so we ended up pivoting to one that was closer and might have better weather for the week.
We got dropped off in the early afternoon at around 1600 feet of elevation and followed the path of a small meltwater stream uphill to a nearby cirque and made camp there for the night while glassing the nearby ridgelines between clouds.
The following morning was fairly cloudy but we decided to make our way up the left side of the peak seen top right in the above picture and work our way down the ridgeline that skirted our bowl and ran south with several other ridges protruding perpendicular to the east. We figured the steep exposed faces of the perpendicular ridges might hold billies and the north/south ridge seemed quite manageable.
Luckily for us, as we were ascending the chute/scree slope a goat decided to come investigate the racket (probably wondering what all our cursing was about) and popped his head over the peak/ridge off to our right.
I was above my hunting partner and had the more parallel shot so I readied my rifle and she managed to get a picture as I was setting up. He briefly wandered away as I worked my way towards an area flat enough to where I could have free hands to shoot but fortunately came right back to check us out again and presented me with a lovely quartered away shot that I took at what I'm guessing was about 200 yards, as there was too much water in the air for my rangefinder to work.
The shot went through the crease and the shoulder joint on the opposite side before coming to rest beneath the far side hide. He dropped where he stood and as goats are wont to do kept dropping, and dropping, and dropping, before coming to rest in the snow at the bottom of our cirque, less one horn that was never recovered.
After quick congratulations and a round of thanks to the goat we butchered him on the snow before dragging the meat to the far side of the snow field and burying it in the snow wrapped in a tarp.
At this point my hunting partner was even more excited to get one of her own (understandably so given it would be her first) so we packed back up and headed out along our originally planned course.
We made camp on the backside of the first perpendicular ridge in a spot with good viewshed of the cliffs on the second and third ridges before heading out for an evening scouting expedition. Seemingly every knoll or clump of rock would start clucking as we drew close and after spotting the first ptarmigan we could usually make out truly improbable numbers of them. Part of me wished for a slingshot and part of me was glad to not have the temptation to add weight to my pack.
We made it as far as the third ridge before turning around and it was on the way back, around 7pm, when I spotted a second billy approximately 1850 yards distant from my perch on the spine of the second ridge. A hair over a mile as the crow flies doesn't seem much until you're on rough terrain after a long day with heavy packs so it was only after some spirited discussion that I conceded that we could give chase with the agreement that we would gut and skin and come back to finish the following day if we were successful.
We caught glimpses of him again at 1600, 900, and then again 700 yards. The adrenaline from the initial sighting draining just as the excitement of getting close began to build. As we crept over the ridge at 700 a cloud blew through obscuring our vision and by the time it had cleared he was gone. Hearts in our chests, we hiked out to the ridge he had just been on, hoping to catch a glimpse of where he'd gone. We were able to check that he hadn't snuck beneath us on the cliff side below our ridgeline and he wasn't anywhere on the near side of the ridge. With trepidation we moved to the far side of the ridge and lo and behold, our goat was meandering along a bench some 200 yards below us having acquired a friend (who appeared to be another billy). I was nervous about their location but there was no dissuading my friend from taking the shot so we set up and I got in position to spot for her. The first shot out of her great-grandfathers trusty Model 70 (in 270 Win) caught him a little far back. I called out a hit and told her to adjust right a foot but he was already racing downhill as his friend looked towards us with a confused expression and slowly trotted away. We cursed and rushed, half sliding, half running, to the next bench down where he had been before the shot and peered over the edge. A follow up shot went through high on the front shoulder and out through the joint on the other side and, of course, he tumbled further down the bowl.
We reached him about 15 minutes later and had just enough time to gut and partially skin him and make it up to the rim of the bowl before night fell. We made the trudge back to camp with lamps on our heads and smiles on our faces.
The following day was probably the most grueling, as we had to finish field dressing the goat and hike him out of the bowl and across the ridgeline to a patch of snow in a swale on the ridge above the lake. The 1000 vertical feet back to where he was when he was shot were the hardest.
We managed to surprise a somewhat scraggly solo wolf coming over a hill and from that point on would encounter his tracks at nearly every patch of snow on our way back to camp.
At some point on our trudge back we realized we wouldn't have time to ferry all of the meat to the takeout before our scheduled pickup and so we made the decision to use an alternate route to drop the second goat down at the lakeshore. Much as I'm loathe to deviate from a known good route, this one looked good from the satellite with maybe one excessively steep section along the river path we intended to follow.
We made good time down, eventually reaching a section some 400 vertical feet above the lake where our route was interrupted by a 30 foot waterfall. We tied off our packs one at a time and lowered them down before picking our way unencumbered down the edge and retrieving them. The whole maneuver took about an hour but even still the alternative route saved us maybe half a day over following the ridges back up and over the way we had come.
We hiked back up to the ridge and took our camp equipment across and down to the cache where we'd left the first goat, discovering that the wolf we had been following on and off had pulled the hide off of the meat but hadn't disturbed any of the bags of meat. Instead it looked like he had settled for the pelvis off of the goats nearby carcass.
We were able to ferry the second load of meat down to the lake that night and went to sleep knowing we had only to pack out our camping equipment before our morning flight out. As we nursed our rehydrated dinners, having spent two full days packing the second goat across miles of rugged mountaintop, we were treated to the sight of another billy slowly meandering not 400 yards from where we'd made camp the first night, seemingly content with the knowledge that we were tired and our tags already filled.
Our pilot was fortunately grudgingly willing to pick up both us and goat #1 from the spot they had dropped us off and goat #2 from the other corner of the lake and after circling the lake to give us the maximum possible take off distance our plane lifted off and we were on our way home.
Pertinent information: we both had over the counter resident tags for goats of either gender. Because I'm a hypebeast/gearhead the rifle is one I assembled on a defiance action chambered in 7 Sherman Short and the bullet was a 155gr Hammer Hunter with an impact velocity around 2850 fps. My hunting partner used a pre-1964 Winchester Model 70 chambered in .270 Winchester loaded with 130gr Barnes TTSX and had an estimated impact velocity of 2480 fps. Flights were around $900 round trip from Juneau, although they would be slightly cheaper if we hadn't gotten anything since they could have flown us back in the Cessna 206 rather than the DeHavilland Beaver
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