Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game 7 in, 8 out

Hard to say where all this adventure starts, but if you want some background on the pack goats, start here.

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbt...75945/more-on-the-packgoats#Post12975945

For those more interested in this mountain goat hunt, I found out I drew the license back in May. However, Colorado had some wicked snows this past year and I couldn’t get close to my goat country until August, and even then I didn’t find a mountain goat for various reasons related to gambling on getting into the most remote section of the unit.

So, the season opened and I haven’t seen a goat and from some discussions with those in the know, it sounded like all the DIY guys were headed to the easiest place. My plan was to stay mobile and drainage and ridge hop until I found a goat, letting the 7 kids carry nearly everything on their first hunt as 18 month olds. I had budgeted 5 days for this, had to be back at least briefly and the season would remain open for a few more days if I needed to make an additional banzai run.

I had room for one person to come along, and my buddy Adam volunteered. I had been on his mountain goat hunt 10 years ago and he blew off a muzzleloader hunt for me on this adventure. He was the right guy for the job as he could put up with damn near anything and has with some of my hair brained schemes.

Day 1

We got to the trailhead, loaded the goats and headed out just before 2pm. The goal was to get into Big Devil Basin that night but we pretty quickly realized this 3500 feet we had to gain wasn’t going to happen by that night. We trudged up the mountain on a decent trail and found our first mountain goats on a distant mountainside by about 4pm.


In examining the map, The goats were at the head of Manson Creek, which butted up to Big Devil and cliffed out if we headed directly at them from our current location. So we stayed the course.





However, we found no water in any spring or ephemeral drainage on the way up. So by 7pm we set camp and set out to investigate the last springs indicated on the map and GPS, but with no luck. We had been conservative enough with water for ourselves on the way in so we figured we’d be ok to get to Big Devil, but would be fughed if there was no water there. There was not enough spare water for a hot meal that night, so we simply ate our sandwiches for dinner. The step counter said we did 7.5 miles, which may have been a little optimistic but we were ready for bed as soon as it got dark. Elevation gain was about 2500 feet. To expedite the repacking in the morning, we decided not to bother with getting the tent out. Besides, it was a beautiful night.

Tagging this for forthcoming posts. Sounds like an adventure.

Day 2.0

We got up at dawn and quickly got our things together, ate a little and hit the road. We had camped pretty close to the end of the useful portion of the trail and would bushwhack from here, hoping to keep our altitude and wrap around the toe of the mountain up into Big Devil Basin.

We crossed Little Devil Creek, which was dry at this altitude, crossed some rockslides and tried our damndest to keep our altitude while side hill bushwhacking. It was very tough going at times, and Adam, who owns several horses admitted there was no way his horses could have cut across the toe of the mountain the way we did off trail in the brush. We had to hold on to bushes to keep from sliding down each time we took a step, but the goats handled it with aplomb.


We finally made it into Big Devil Basin, and could see the drainage, but couldn’t make out whether there was any water with our binoculars.. We didn’t want to lose 500-1000 feet unnecessarily as we first crossed into the basin to check out the water situation and hoped it would be running higher up. We continued to side hill until we got to the creek and now we thought we could hear it.



Glassing up the drainage we thought we could see wet rocks, so when we popped into the creek bed, we were deflated when there was no water in sight. But we could still hear it, and looking just 59 yards downhill it popped back above ground and we all managed to stock up. It was 10am at 10,200 feet and the goats probably hadn’t drank in over 24 hours and Adam and I were down to puddles in our water bladders. We also filled additional containers of water and threw those on Nigel who presently had the most room and least weight in his panniers.



As we relaxed in the creek bed, after filtering and filling water bladders and letting the goats fill up and rest, we began to glass the slopes. White objects in darker backgrounds caught our eye at the head of the drainage and in the shade on the west side of the drainage. Break time was over and now we had to climb to get a better look.


The objects were all rocks and it was mid day. A hot lunch was in order, so we took our sweet time moving on from here. Even took the packs off the boys so the could rest and air out a little too.


As we continued our climb up the basin, we could make out a trail that I thought I had seen on Google Earth at the head of the basin, crossing into the North Fork of Black Creek. As we slowly glassed and moved up Big Devil Basin, the final cliff face came into view and at the base were two mountain goats. I immediately said, “that’s a goat and I’m gonna shoot it“.



Upon more inspection with the spotting scope, it was a nanny and kid and I decided to pass. It was now 2:30 PM and we debated whether to cross into The North Fork or set up camp here and see if something like yesterday’s goat would wander into the basin by tomorrow morning. Eventually we decide to press on and cross into the next basin, which also backed up to Manson Creek.


Funny thing though, three new goats decided to peek their fuzzy heads over the cliffs above and plans changed. They are barely visible on the skyline in this photo.

Great story! Looking forward to the rest of it.

Just got back from a goat hunt here, not for the weak-hearted.

Yep, me too!

Using goats to hunt goats somehow seems like everyone should try it. Some rough country there. Like everyone I'm anxious for the next installment.

Great story and pictures!

Thanks for sharing.

It sure looks like "Big Devil Basin" is a very appropriate name for that place. Photos never do justice to elevation pictures, yet yours are darned impressive.

Pretty cool adventure.

These are my favorite threads! Excited to hear the rest, exbiologist!

My dad killed a big Billy when I was wee. It was quite an adventure for him too. He and my uncle spent much time at the bars in Salmon, ID, plying locals with alcohol until the two of them got enough info that they knew where Dad needed to hunt. It was a brutal experience that he never wanted to recount later, but he was successful, came out alive, and never did much hunting after that.

Day 2.5

Two of the three goats here looked much larger than the close nanny from afar, but they had us pegged. The real question was did they care about people?


So we waited. And the goats just stood and stared at 300 yards on top of cliffs that would be totally irresponsible to even think about shooting. So, I tied up my white goat out front, tied up the others behind and let boredom or curiosity take hold in the mountain goats.

The best view of what happened is this video that I can’t share easily here. And my camera is old enough that it's of a format not supported by any sharing platforms, so I took an iPhone video of it on my computer and shared through my local CPW Facebook page and covered the yardage and trophy talk with some music. We felt the right and left goats were much larger billies than the smaller middle goat. I decided that if either of those two came all the way off the cliff, I’d take it.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=130987318278640&id=108717590505613

Looking back now at the photo and video I can see what I’m looking at. But I didn’t see any of the telltale hair, horn bases and urination postures while the scene played out.

It came all the way down to the nanny and kid, coming off the crease just above them


So over the course of an hour or so, the 2nd largest goat came all the way down and I made my final stalk, deciding to shoot it. I got behind a tree and found an old dead log for a rest, got a range of 215 yards and dropped the goat with one shot from my 280AI into the point of the shoulder. And then it slowly rolled and rolled and rolled. We have over a minute of rolling footage before it hung up on some willows 100 yards below where I shot it.



As we walked up, I said “dammit, it’s a nanny!”



You can see the goats below us tied up around the trees



We then got to the business of skinning and quartering, deciding to debone in the morning.



Once the initial work was done we found a flat spot and set camp for the night a few hundred yards away.

Awesome adventure.

About 15 years ago I was elk hunting outside of Gunnison, Co with about 6-8” of snow on the ground. I had stopped in the timber for a breather and the next thing I know, a mountain goat comes walking by, maybe 10’ away. It stopped momentarily and looked at me like, “what are you looking at ?” 😀 I didn’t think pull out my camera as it calmly walked off.

My buddy had been hunting about a mile or so away and that evening when we met back at the truck, he said “you’ll never believe what I saw!” I responded “a mountain goat”. He looked at me and asked, “how’d you know?”

“Well, I saw it too!”

Don’t know for sure if it was the same goat or not but it was a quite a shock.

Really cool!

Day 3

Woke up to great satisfaction and a beautiful morning. Although I had hoped to kill a billy, I was still happy. I hadn’t seen a mountain goat in person in years, and it was totally my decision to shoot based on the assumptions of size while she came off the cliffs, probably exaggerating the size of her shoulder hump and blockinness of the body.



We got the goat deboned, and spent a lot of time redoing the packs and weighing loads. We ate a big breakfast and made room in the packs for the meat, giving Ivar the largest load at 19 pounds to keep him close to 10%.

I ended up with the hide and rifle, daypack and not much else attached to my frame. The hide weighed too much and wouldn’t balance well for the goats to take, so that was my chore.


Then the hard part began, and we have no photos because it sucked, was stressful and scary. We decided to bushwhack downhill all the way to the the North Fork, where there would be a trail. And hey, it’s all downhill, how bad could it be?

The simple part was heading back down to water to stock up, then the hell began.

What we couldn’t account for the reason there were no trails into this basin in the first place. It’s because it’s not passable to horses by any conceivable route. We stuck to the ridge between Little and Big Devil, but the ridge abruptly cliffed out. Well not abruptly, that was 5:00pm after 6 hours pushing through doghair aspens and chokecherry.

After eyeballing the drainages around us, it appeared there more cliffs down in Big Devil, so we went back up a few hundred yards before descending into the Little Devil Creek. At the bottom it was so narrow and steep and thick, but we managed to make a few yards a minute. And then it cliffed out, so we went back up and then down around the cliff, this time the goats had jump/skid off a cliff about 15 feet back into the creek.

Next damn obstacle was a waterfall, so back up we climbed, and around the foot of the ridge to Big Devil. It was almost completely vertical and I had climb straight up to escape. The goats figured out a better way by angling a little differently , but all of a sudden we could descend some more and we were in the wide creek bed of a Big Devil, and it was flat.
Only photo I took during that ordeal was Odin needing some love after some stressful stretch



Sweet relief! 6:15pm and we found the trail. There was room to camp here but 45 minutes of light left and a mile or two to the middle fork and main trail, where I thought there may be more decent campsites.
We then hauled balls at quick pace and made it to a campsite that another hunter offered to share

Awesome read! Thanks!

Day 4
We were wiped after 10 miles, almost all of which was off trail and difficult, to say the least. We didn’t bother with the tent, just threw our pads on he ground and went to bed in the long grass along the river.

We knew dew could be an issue close to water, but it frosted everything. No real big deal, but still a cool effect.




In the morning, we packed up quickly and hit the trail. It was 7 miles to work out way around to a different trailhead where the truck was parked but we made it out by noon. 4 days and 30 miles later, but we did it.

The end!

Congratulations and thank you for sharing. Very cool adventure.

Way too cool, and what an adventure. Congrats on a spectacular journey.

Excellent