My dad came up to me one day and asked if I wanted to apply for a mountain goat tag in Washington. He said that if I was lucky enough to draw, it would be one of the toughest hunts I would ever do in my life, but in the end, it would be worth it. I told him I was up for anything Mother Nature threw at me. He put me in for the Washington goat tag, and I got back to my daily life of school and chores.
One day, my dad came up to me and gave me a piece of paper. He told me to read it while he recorded me with his phone. When I finished reading and he stopped recording, I asked him what the paper meant and why he had recorded me while I read it. He told me I had drawn the late season Washington goat tag. When I realized what it was, I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day.
A day before the hunt, my dad and I went into town and got all of the supplies we needed for the trip. We stocked up on PowerBars and gel packs. We didn’t take any real food because we didn’t want too much weight on our backs. We left that day and made the long drive to Washington. I was excited as we were going to stay in a hotel that night.
The next day, we headed off for the mountain. Weeks earlier, my dad had called his good friend, Calvin Halladay, from MOA Rifles to invite him to join us on the hunt. When we reached the mountain, I looked up and my jaw dropped right out. I could not believe we were going to hike all the way up there. All of a sudden, a wave of doubt flooded over me. I was going to have to climb all the way up that mountain. My dad called me over and said we needed to pack up. When we finished packing up, we started heading up the mountain. It felt like I was never going to make it up the mountain. A couple hours in, we took a long break where we filtered water from the last creek we would cross. Our packs got a lot heavier as we had an additional five gallons of water in them.
We were really making progress until we came to the last three steep slopes of the mountain. I was so tired, and my feet hurt. We made it through the first slope pretty easily, but the second one slowed us down a bit. When we reached the third slope, we took a quick break. We slowly started up the last slope. It took us an hour or more to make it up those three slopes. In all, it took us more than seven hours to make it up the mountain. When we reached the top, I was so happy. There were some other goat hunters up there, and they looked at me in disbelief. They could not believe a 12-year-old could hike seven hours straight up a mountain. We looked for a place to camp and found a small, flat spot in the bottom of a small ravine and decided to camp there. We set up our tarps because it was too heavy to take tents. We set up a tripod and started glassing to see if we could find some goats. After it got too dark to shoot, one of the other hunters spotted a goat that came over the ridge and bedded down pretty close to us. I could not see it, so I went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, my dad and Calvin were talking with the other hunters. They had just killed the goat they had found the evening before. I congratulated them and then got ready for the day. I packed the things I needed for the day and headed out to explore the area around me. When my dad called me 10 minutes later, I headed back and he told me we were going to go for a big hike and look for some goats.
We climbed up to a high point and started seeing goats. Most were in an area where if we shot one we would not be able to recover it as the country had cliffs everywhere. We spotted a nice goat in a basin above a giant snowfield. I decided that was the goat I wanted, and Calvin helped me set up for the shot as my dad tried to video it with his Phone Skope. It was hard to get set up because I was on a steep angle. I found the goat in my scope and shot. I missed, and the goat started running. It ran a little ways and stopped. I got it back in my scope and shot. The goat dropped right there but ended up rolling a little ways down into the snowfield.
We had to cross through a giant boulder field to reach the goat, and it seemed like it took forever. I was so happy that it was hard to control my excitement when we walked up to the goat. We took a lot of pictures and then took care of the goat. Luckily, the trip back to camp was all downhill. When we got back to camp, the other hunters had left us some of their food. I found some Fritos, and they tasted heavenly after all of the PowerBars and gels we’d been eating. We dumped the rest of our water out and then packed up camp and headed down the mountain.
I want to give a special thanks to my dad, Robert Hanneman, and Calvin Halladay. They were the ones who made this hunt possible. I recently learned that the draw odds I beat to draw the second season conflict goat hunt on the Olympic Peninsula were 1 in 723!
In all that I went through, it was not just physical strength but also mental strength and the desire to kill a goat that helped me be successful. I encourage any kids out there to believe in themselves and try their hardest.
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
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