It had always been a dream of mine to hunt mountain goat, and that dream became a reality when my good friend, Michael Hartman, and I drew tags for Kodiak, Alaska. We scheduled a hunt with Sam Roher of Roher Bear Camp for the end of September. Mike and I arrived at base camp via floatplane and went our separate ways with our guides and packers.
Guide Aaron Pingree, packer Jon Neil, and I started out by taking a small skiff up a river a few miles and hiking to the top of a mountain that was not accessible by plane. We got three-quarters of the way to the top by nightfall and set up camp for the night.
A storm came in, and we dealt with rain and fog the next day, which was my first day of hunting. We ended up moving camp to a better spot out of the wind and closer to where we wanted to look for goats. That evening, the storm cleared, so we hiked up to a vantage spot to see if we could spot some goats and make a game plan for the following morning. We spotted a herd with 40 goats in it, including a few decent billies. Aaron said we would check another part of the mountain in the morning before we went after any of the goats in the big herd.
The next morning, we packed up camp and hiked up higher to check over another area. We got to our next vantage point, and we could see four billies bedded on the side of the mountain. Two were noticeably bigger than the other two, and Aaron said they were both shooters. They were at 900 yards and we couldn’t get to them as the wind was wrong to make a stalk. We set up camp for the night and hoped the wind would be better in the morning.
I was the first one up the next morning, chomping at the bit as the wind had changed in our favor. We hiked back up to our vantage point to plan our stalk, but some nannies and kids from the big herd had moved in front of the billies. We watched for a few hours, hoping they would move out so we could make a stalk, but no such luck. After looking at the weather forecast, we decided to put a stalk on them as it showed two days of rain and fog.
Soon after we started our stalk, the billies got up and started feeding away from us. We had to hurry without alerting the nannies and kids that were between us. We got to a comfortable range for a shot, and Aaron told me which billy to shoot. It was a hard quartering shot, but I put it right on the mark. I had to shoot him two more times with the 30 Nosler. He ended up being a 5 1/2-year-old billy with 9 1/2" horns. When we got back to base camp, we found out Mike had got his goat as well.
My late grandpa told me when I was younger to, “Do it while you can.” He meant the older you get, the harder these physically demanding hunts would be. He was right as I was glad I did it now and it also put in perspective some other ones I need to do in the near future.
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