After having all these plans with a GoPro knockoff camera on my backpack, a new point and shoot camera that I was carrying with me, and a nice HD camcorder that my friend Mike was carrying, here I was up on the mountain by myself to take my hero shots. I pulled out my little tripod and set up my point and shoot camera and put the timer on and took a whopping 3 pictures. Of course I didn't end up with quite the quality of pictures that I had envisioned. I wanted to get the big valley in the background of my picture, but the sun was wrong and I should have turned around and had the picture taken with the mountain behind me instead but I wasn't thinking too clearly when everything was going down. At least the pictures are reasonably focused and I think they will work.
Here's the hero shots.
It turned out to be every bit of the hunt I had hoped for and then some! At the time I shot him, I was just so happy to have shot a decent looking billy with good hair. It turned out that he was actually a decent sized goat as the folks at Fish and Game were all very complimentary at how big he was especially for a 3 1/2 year old goat. After caping him and getting an accurate measurement, both horns were 8 6/8" long and his bases were both 5 4/8". When you add it all up I ended up with 45 6/8" before drying which isn't too far off of the minimum 47" for Boone & Crockett.
Okay so I'm back on the mountain and got some pictures taken and it's officially dark now and the rain is coming in with lightning in the distance. Time to get busy!
I mentioned that my friend had stayed back at the bottom on this stalk and although we had come up with some hand signals to help direct me to the goat, that had pretty much been a failure, although in the end I ended up actually stumbling upon him out of luck. When we split up I did grab a radio just in case I got into trouble while up on the mountain. I radioed him that the goat was down and that I was starting to work on it. He had heard the shots although he had also lost track of the goat and wanted to come up and help me get him out. I said great and expected to see him in a little bit.
After the other hunters story of the grizzly coming in on them while they were working on the elk, I moved my gun and my backpack with my pepper spray right next to where I was working on the goat. I had watched a few videos on how to cape an animal for a life sized mount and got right to work with my havalon knife. He had really long hair, but overall it went pretty smoothly getting him caped and quartered out.
As I was about finished up on one side my friend radioed me and asked me where I was at. I yelled as loud as I could and ended up giving him my GPS coordinates, but he never could find me in the dark and ended up getting cliffed out and in the end decided to just go back down and wait for me at the bottom.
Skinning him out, it turned out that my first shot was high and had hit him in the spine and then my second shot was rushed and I hit him right at the base of the neck. It was a very quick kill shot, but the result was a baseball sized hole in his fur at the base of his neck where the exit was because all the bone fragments that blew out. Thankfully, the current plan is for that side to be against the wall and my taxidermist said that the hair is so long he thinks he can fix it although he might have to shrink the neck down a little bit. Hopefully it will all work out, other than the damage from my bullets the cape and face were in great shape which isn't always the case on mountain goats after they come to rest.
Okay, back to skinning and quartering him. I got him all skinned and set that aside and just about had him quartered as it really started to rain pretty good. My buddy had made it back down to the bottom and radioed up a real positive confidence boosting report that went something like "That lightning is really starting to get close and it's starting to rain pretty good. You need to really start working your way down and just leave the goat, this is the kind of stuff where people end up dying on the mountain." Up where I was at the lightning still seemed a safe distance to me and the rain was more of a sprinkle so I told him I was going to finish getting him quartered and bagged and come down the mountain with the head and cape. About 30 minutes later and everything was done. I had all the meat in my game bag, although I didn't debone any of the quarters and packed the cape into the load shelf on my backpack. I kicked the carcass off the shelf and heard it roll a few times so I figured that would attract any bears and keep them off the meat in my game bag and with the hurry I was in I didn't bother to hang anything.
I really like my Stone Glacier backpack and the ability to load things between my bag and the frame of the backpack in the load sling. It worked great although I didn't get any pictures of it in the dark.
I started down the mountain in the dark and in about 2 steps realized that this was going to be harder than I thought. The mountain was full of boulders and climbing up and down in the past we had actually spent most of our time using them to climb up and down. When they are dry they give you good footing and there are usually cracks to hang onto and I had felt really confident going up and down. In the rain, the moss turned these same boulders into an ice skating rink. SUPER slippery! Even on a relatively flat spot I nearly ended up on my butt within a step or two.
So my strategy for getting down changed completely. First and foremost I looked for any type of vegetation like grass or shrubs that would allow me to get some kind of a foothold to keep me upright. Loose ground was also good as I could dig my heels in as I stepped down and that worked to keep me upright as well. There were still a few areas where I couldn't avoid going across the rocks, but I just went really slow and always was hanging onto something. My hands ended up getting pretty scratched up because of constantly grabbing onto brush and tree branches to keep my balance. Creek bottoms and avalanche chutes are normally places I avoid, but they ended up being about the best way to get down the mountain while avoiding the more slippery rocks with the moss on them. About 1/2 way down, I'm climbing over deadfall and stumbling over rocks and lost my balance and grabbed onto a tree branch to keep from falling and wouldn't you know it, the tree branch breaks off in my hand. I fell right over onto my back pretty hard. Thankfully the way I had packed the cape and head, the horns weren't pointed toward my back and it actually ended up cushioning my fall. I was surprised that I didn't end up hurting myself at all in the fall.
I got back up and kept heading down. It seemed to take forever and it was actually less than 1/2 mile to the bottom and only 800' of elevation loss. Again, deadfall is something that you would normally avoid, but it seemed the safest route so I kept climbing over deadfall and sticking to the heaviest brush and timber. I was able to finally see and hear the ranger with a couple hundred yards to go and I was VERY thankful to break out into the last clearing. It hadn't ever ended up being a full blown rainstorm, so God was for sure looking out for me and I had done a LOT of praying on the way down.
A quick trip back to camp and we decided to go ahead and try to wash the blood out of the cape in the creek. We head down there and I'm just strolling along, completely forgetting that the rocks might be slippery when I end up with my feet rocketing out from under me and landing HARD on my tailbone. It still hurts a little while I'm typing this almost 2 full weeks later! All that work getting down the mountain without hurting myself and then I bust it just walking down to the creek to wash out the cape.
We spent a good 15 minutes or so trying to get the blood washed out and realized that we had just increased the weight of the cape by about 40 pounds by getting it wet. It took both of us to carry it back to camp and I was much more cautious this time around. We hung it up to let it drip although with the rain coming off and on I'm not sure it did a whole lot of good.
Some prayers of thanksgiving for a successful hunt and safety, some dinner and I was in the sack, exhausted.
Shockingly though I think I only got about an hour or two of sleep that night. I'm usually a sound sleeper and don't have problems going to sleep but the events of the week kept racing through my mind. All the what ifs and the relief of getting a billy and I just couldn't get my mind to stop and get to sleep. I woke up the next morning ready to go so I guess just laying there did me some good, but I guess I was about as full of adrenaline as I had ever been so sleeping was a difficult proposition that night.
Kind of a recap of the final stalk.
The green line is the route I ended up taking to get to him. The red circle is where he was when I shot him. We saw him very close to this spot earlier in the day, but he just moved back into the timber about 100 yards or so where you couldn't see him from the bottom any longer. Thankfully I caught a glimpse of him on my way down.
The yellow circle is where the lone goat was that I saw on Sunday morning when I first got there. I think it may have been the same billy when it was all said and done.
Not the best picture but thought this was a neat shot through the spotting scope of me up at the top of the mountain.
