How many goats have you killed over your extensive hunting career H?
Five, plus I hit one in the ribs with Brodhead from a semi recurve bow, which should have been a bagged goat, but the broadhead was defective, I found out afer. Later that year I killed a good mule deer buck with my bow. The buck died, but with an arrow to finish the kill, the new Bear broad head curled up when it hit a bone, and that was one of the batch of arrows I had earlier in the fall hit the goat with. I sent the damaged broad head back to Fred Bear and told him my story. His reply was, "I had a batch that didn't get proper heat treatment, but we looked after that and they are good now!" Didn't even give me any new arrows.
I know, it doesn't sound like many dead goats, but I always hunted far more for the trip, than I did to bring game home and I have passed up a lot of legal game, including goats, that I could have shot.
I took a young son, he was 14 the first year, three consecutive years on really tough goat hunts, before he got one the third year.
The first year it took us two hard days of locating old blazed trails, made thirty or forty years previously by prospectors, to avoid steep cliffs, to get us to the base of the mountain we were going to hunt on. On the years following we could make it to the base of the mountain in one day. We always camped at the same spot, a beautiful pine flat with a crystal clear, tiny creek running through it. I, sometimes with other hunting partners, camped there for five different years, over about eight years, and in all that time not another soul had camped, or left any sign, of camping, hunting, or being in our area. To my mind, that is mountain hunting at its best.
All in all, I have hunted goats in some fabulous areas, including an area made into a conservation reserve, no hunting, no trespassing area, shortly after we hunted there. In the northern Rockies I flew us into an area where no guides worked out of and no other resident hunters had ever been there. We spent a glorious week there but there were no sheep and the closest I got to goats was a half mile, but the alpine was fabulous, with more hoary marmots, (whistlers) than I have seen in all the rest of my life!
On another hunt in Tweedsmuir Park we had to climb the north side of a mountain, which is always an alder infested night mare, and this one was no different. It was a great grizzly bear country and we actually travelled a good part of the time on grizzly paths and in the alders it was grizzly tunnels! My partner was a bow hunter, so I went first with my 30-06 and we often had to bend down to get through the grizzly trails. I don't think I would ever do that again, but it does leave a person with a lot of great memories.
