Sometimes, dreams really do come true! It was 25 years ago, when I was just 8 years old, that I went on my first backpacking trip with my dad and brother into the Mt. Baker Wilderness, God’s country! The resident goat hunt had recently been shut down due to low population counts, and we wanted to see for ourselves how the population was doing. In two days, we spotted over 100 different goats. It was on that day that I knew my love and passion for the mountains started. From that day on, I dreamed of the day when I could hunt mountain goats for myself.
Twenty-five years later and 25 bonus points later, I was still waiting for a tag. I had spent hundreds of days in Mt. Baker goat country hunting over-the-counter tags for deer and black bear and just trying to see and photograph goats. While I felt like I knew the goat herd intimately, it felt like my dream of actually hunting a goat had never been further away. In hopes of changing my luck, I decided to invest some of my application funds into the statewide raffle tag. In mid-July, I got the call I had always dreamed of letting me know I was the lucky recipient of my dream tag!
I had a lofty goal of harvesting a long-haired Booner goat with my bow. However, this was my dream hunt and I wanted to spend as much time as possible in my unit throughout the season. With that in mind, I spent all of September and October exploring every corner of my unit looking for my target goat and enjoying time in the most beautiful country on earth. Unfortunately, despite covering over 100 miles, I had yet to lay eyes on a goat that I felt justified notching my tag. The dry summer followed by an extremely stormy fall seemed to have moved the goats into near areas, and I was having trouble turning up even half the goats I was used to seeing in previous years in this country.
Finally, in late October, I got a break and glassed a goat more than seven miles distant way up the headwaters of a glacial runoff stream. I convinced a buddy to hike up the streambed with me the next day, which was no small feat as it involved 12 stream crossings in hip waders and more than 1,900 feet elevation gain over four extremely rough miles. We finally found a good billy hanging out where the water for the creek exited the glacier. After glassing and videoing the goat, we felt he had good length and age but mediocre mass and not quite what we wanted to shoot this early in the season.
Weather continued to hit my unit hard with record floods that shut down the entire county with some cities under eight feet of water. At one time, I had to go 10 days where I couldn’t even access the unit due to flooded roads, and when I finally did get on logging roads, I was constantly turned back by washouts and old growth trees across the roads. It was mid-November, and the pressure was building. I was snowed out of the high country and knew I had to get things done or risk eating tag soup.
On November 18th, I scouted out one of the glacial creeks in my unit and felt water levels had finally fallen enough that we could safely cross if necessary to chase a goat. Unfortunately, I was still not turning up the big herds I was used to seeing in the rut. I decided to go back to the drainage where I had seen the billy in October. This time, the hike in was a completely different adventure with four inches of snow on top of the creek bed boulders and a dozen plus creek crossings belly button deep at least.
After four miles of slow hiking and creek crossings, we finally spotted a lone goat about 700 feet above the creek in the cliffs. Dissecting the goat through the scope revealed it was the same billy I’d seen a month earlier but with a full winter coat in place. Although not in a location for a bow stalk, I was ready to take him with my rifle. Unfortunately, he moved upstream before I could get settled for a shot.
After moving upstream another quarter mile, we caught him in the cliffs chasing nannies through the snow. Finally, he stopped on a prominent rock long enough for me to take a 47-degree, 324-yard shot. I drilled him twice and watched him tip backwards off the rock with the whole sequence caught on video. Celebration ensued, but we knew we had a lofty task ahead of us just to get to the goat, let alone get him back to the creek.
In an effort to lighten our loads as much as possible, we dropped everything disposable at the creek bottom, including my rifle, and started hiking up an avalanche chute to get to my goat. After climbing a couple hundred feet towards the goat, the herd he was with crossed above us and triggered an avalanche down our chute. We hid behind a large boulder as the avalanche cascaded down either side. After that, we made sure to stay on steep spine ridges and out of the actual chutes to stay safe.
After 45 minutes of tough climbing, we made it the 700 feet up to where we expected to find my goat. However, when we came around the boulder he was standing on when I shot, he jumped from his bed and ran straight away from us. We were shocked! Of course, I had made the rookie mistake of leaving my rifle down at the creek bottom and had no way of finishing the goat. He seemed to be moving north to the original avalanche chute we had spotted him in that morning, so Ryan offered to stay high and keep an eye on him while I went back to the creek in hopes of getting a finishing shot at him from the creek bottom.
By the time I’d retrieved our gear and made the quarter mile hike downstream, the fog had moved in and the goat had already moved through the avalanche chute into the timber on the other side. I made the decision to climb straight up this chute to Ryan to make the final approach on the goat. Unfortunately, this chute turned out to be even harder climbing than the first with one 70-foot section of 70-degree rockface covered in four inches of snow. I had to toe pick my crampons and bury a trekking pole for a snow anchor for every five feet of elevation I gained. After another hour of climbing, I got to Ryan and we worked our way above the goat in hopes of pushing him back down towards the creek if we spooked him any further.
We tracked the goat for over a quarter mile through the snow, timber, and cliffs before finally getting a final shot at him as he stood on the top of a 100-foot cliff. At my shot, he tumbled straight off the cliff and we were able to see him laying in the snow a mere 100 feet away, but he was impossible to get to. We spent the next half hour traversing the top of that cliff before finally finding a devil’s club-choked seep that would allow us to maneuver down by lowering ourselves down with devil’s club branches as our anchors. We were soaked and beat up!
Finally getting to my goat not four hours since the original shot was cathartic. It felt surreal that my dream had finally been achieved. It turned out my first shot had only clipped one lung while breaking his front shoulder, and the second head-on shot had shattered his sternum. Despite a broken shoulder and sternum, he had still managed to fight for four hours and over half a mile. In his initial fall from the rock I had shot him on, he had broken half an inch off one horn while the other was partially broken but still hanging by a thread. If both horns had been intact, they would have measured 10.25". His growth rings revealed him to be 6.5 years old.
By the time we’d finished caping him for a full body mount, it had been dark for more than an hour and we still had a long hike ahead of us. The creek crossings were significantly scarier in the dark with a full goat cape and two quarters on my back. We had an hour of heavy snow before the clouds cleared to a beautiful, starlit, moonless night. Finally, at nearly midnight, we stumbled to my truck with a lifelong dream fulfilled.
When all was said and done, I had spent 19 days hunting mountain goats in the Mt. Baker Wilderness. My dream was everything I ever wanted it to be and more. Although I didn’t harvest my goat with a bow, I had turned up a mature, rutting billy in snow and was able to do it safely in my favorite place on earth. God is good, that’s for sure!
Washington Mountian Goat Hunting
Login