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As the season approached two weeks later, a major league snowstorm was forecasted for the area. There were calling for up to two feet in the mountains, which would totally F my plans. In addition to it being harder to physically get there, it might be enough to move the elk and would certainly make forage hard to come by for goats (I don't pack in feed if I can avoid it). Also, it sounded like it would be miserably cold. My buddy Adam and I had 10 days budgeted for the season, so we decided to wait a day and just assemble gear. The hope was the warmer weather would melt off much of that snow. I had a back up plan for some lower elevation options, but was hoping to not go in blind. Also, I finally got my hands on a horse trailer, so I could take all 7 goats with me. They were too heavy for my F150 to be able to handle all 1500+ pounds of gear and goats in the back on mountain roads. They would cause my truck to squat so badly that I was worried about proper steering and braking. The four biggest were all around 240, plus or minus. The two smallest were about 180-190. Ragnar was in between, somewhere around 215ish.
We packed pretty heavily, in case we did in fact need 10 days and if we, were going to be in snow and mud, our gear would be wet all the time. We also took in pack frames, and tied our daypacks to those (went with a fanny pack plus the little Kuiu water bladder pack). If I remember right, total weight was around 25 pounds average each. The bigger boys were a bit under 30 pounds and the smaller ones took a little under 20 each. I think my goal was around 160 total, which we exceeded by a bit, but not much. This would leave some room for elk, but not a full camp to be able to come out in one load, unless we took a bunch of it on our backs. If I limited each goat to 15% of body weight (they were two years old this year, by four the hope is 25%+), I had about 225 pounds capacity, plus my back and Adam, and presumably we'd eat some of our food before shooting an elk. No way I was going to pack out a full skull if I could avoid it.
I did have high hopes for a good bull as it took me a few years to draw this license, so all my assumptions on pack out weight were that i wasn't going to take a little guy.





We left home at dawn, with the packs prepacked and weighed, going over two passes that gave us a pretty good indication that we likely wouldn't be dealing with two feet of snow. The Snotel data I looked at said only 8 or 10 inches on some of the surrounding mountains, which would still suck, plus night time tempts would be in the teens and twenties. Thankfully it would warm up to 50 in the day time with plenty of sunshine. So I felt that even if there was much snow, it would melt quickly enough. We went for it. As we neared the actual mountains we'd be hunting, we could see there was snow up high, but I could also see rock, which meant to me, that we'd be fine. Sure enough, when hitting the trail, it took about three hours of hiking before even hitting snow patches. A couple of the goats would stop and eat the snow, but none of them wanted to water yet. We kept the smaller guys up front, which allowed for a better pace than two weeks prior.







On the trail in, we ran into a woman and her dad heading in to help pack out a bull for the woman's husband who shot one with archery equipment and got a little intel from them, but they were pretty cryptic as to where they were headed. It was just getting dark when we arrived where I wanted to camp. Sure enough, there was a camp on one side of the creek I wanted to use and then there were two hunters and a guide in the outfitter camp. I decided to set up a bit below where I previously camped to indicate to the other guys where I intended to hunt. The DIYers were headed up much higher every day and the outfitter was pretty limited by what he could do with a 70 something year old in poor shape trying to elk hunt, but also insisted on being present for his son's deer. I wasn't too worried. We did not get any tree cover, as there were no stringer trees for camp, but it allowed me to do a long low line for the goats. We did put the gear just inside the treeline though. Elevation was about 11,100. Just as we finished getting camp set and started to gather water, the goats alerted and a big bull moose walked right through camp. He didn't do anything, but I could hear him grunting a fair bit after we ate and went to bed.







more coming...