Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Back from the deer hunt

Holy smokes, great thread! Can't wait to see the next installment.

Always enjoy these tales
Best of luck,and as other have mentioned,looking forward to chapter 2

This is s new one on me! Very interesting.

Sorry for the delays, life and stuff…
So after we packed and ride out the rain, evening was coming on and we hiked up out of our valley over the ridge toward a meadow that overlooked a much larger ridge and hill side. We brought the goats with us and made Ragnar carry a pack full of rain gear and leashes and stuff.



As we settled in, the boys laid down which thankfully helps to make them less spooky to game in my opinion.
I immediately heard a bugle and some cow elk cross the meadow. While a few others crossed inside the timber behind us.
About an hour later, Nigel and Ragnar immediately stood up and looked back into the woods, staring intently. We knew something was coming but didn’t know what. A minute or two later a nice bull elk silently walked by the edge of the timber. I filmed it with the phone but hard to make him out.



A little before dark we saw a few more cows and heard several bugles. In the hike in and around the meadow we found no fresh deer sign, all of it pretty old.

At camp, the bulls continued to bugle off and on all night. Nothing intense but steady and put a smile on my face.

We took the goats down to the creek and they showed no interest in drinking, but we stayed down there to cook dinner, eat and filter water. The goats are weird like this, they never seem to drink on the first day. With the rain, I was even less surprised they didn’t drink this time. Still, I’ve got to give them the chance.

The next morning we hiked up a few hundred feet higher to another open hill side. The elk were still bugling a little bit off and on. We tied the goats up in the timber about a hundred yards from the meadow and the ridge. Katie immediately spotted a small herd of elk in the dark below us.



As the sun rose, we found three small bull elk hanging out with a large bull moose. A herd of 20 elk with 1 bull left the big meadow a few minutes after the sun hit grass.

We sat the the edge of the meadow glassing across the valley we were camped on and while seeing all sorts of elk, still no deer. The mountain range we were on went considerably higher so we wondered if the deer only moved through the area later in the season. So we had a hard decision to make, pack up camp and move higher or stay put and Hunt even further up mountain going through a ton of black timber on our way to higher ridges. In one direction the mountain turned to really high peaks and stayed in the wilderness, the other, there’s was a very high, gradual, open ridge line that had some motorized trails and some presumably closed roads ( looking at aerials and maps we could see logging activity but didn’t appear as those open roads accessed each cut over clearing.

I sure didn’t like the idea of packing through a wilderness only to get to motorized trails though, but we thought we needed to get higher and we were only a few miles away. Ultimately we decided we had try a new spot as we only had four total days and 1.5 into it we hadn’t seen a deer yet.

It sucked packing up wet [bleep] in a hurry but we knew it would rain again and so we wanted to get moving quickly. No meticulous folding of our stuff, we just threw it into the packs, weighed them and took off. Several goats looked off balance, but nothing we couldn’t fix with a few rocks.

We gained about 1500 feet, mostly on trail over the next few hours with only a little drizzle on us. As we created out of the wilderness into the logged area we finally saw a doe deer! We set up camp near some sort of corral that has a nice spring and big spruces for weather protection. By about three the thunder started rolling in again just as we got the tent up and the rain picked up. Didn’t bother with tarp shelters this time.

More to come…

That night after the afternoon storm we hiked back towards where we saw the doe as there was a logged clearing just past there.
We decided to leave the goats in camp tied up on leashes. Wouldn’t you know but not 400 yards from camp we saw a smallish bear scoot across the trail. I kinda felt like I was committed to keep going and hope the bear didn’t mess with the goats. It wasn’t very large and the goats were probably quite a bit bigger than the bear, so I crossed my fingers and kept going.

We got to the edge of a cut and we could hear ATVs and saw a few in the distance. I was willing to accept that was a risk but was definitely disappointed to have packed into here the hard way. We were now over 11,000 feet and sure enough we were in deer. We decided on the hike up that the first legal buck would get our attention and sure enough we saw two yearling forkies in velvet with two other does and fawns as we’re down to only one full day left. Katie didn’t hesitate and immediately started to stalk them. I was carrying the shooting sticks and stayed behind while she crunched through the slash. She got to within 60 yards or so and took an offhand shot while the bucks were focused on the sound of an ATV on the other side of the cut. She frickin missed! The buck turned his head to look back at the shot and then trotted off with the others while Katie reloaded in a drizzle.
She was pretty hard on herself but I was secretly hoping it was a blessing in disguise.
I tried not to laugh at her so I shut my mouth out my arm around her and kept walking. We crossed a few more openings and crossed a 4wheeler trail or possibly full size vehicle two track into a pretty recent cut and saw two more bucks, this time they were nice ones. Both in velvet. Both big high four points but not very wide. They were a bit over 150 yards and Katie tried to close the distance by putting a big slash pile between her and deer but as soon as she came out from around the pile the crunching of all the sticks and crap gave her away and the bucks ran. We tried to find them in the meadow past the timber strip and found two more bucks, these two smaller but hard antlered. The stuck around long enough for Katie to get set up for a 100 yard shot but we’re already alerted to us and quickly walked off into the timber as we lost light.



I was relieved to see the goats were fine when I got back to camp and that our food haven’t been messed with.

It’s like I’m on the hunt…but without the exhaustion and suffering. 😎 Thanks for sharing this interesting adventure. Keeping an eye out for future installments.

Doc_Holidude

Over dinner that night we did a little more map studying and decided to come back to that spot as they were at least four bucks around. But we needed to stay out of the slash so we chose a route through uncut black timber(this was hard to figure out as the aerial photos didn’t show all the logged areas) and focus on setting up in the meadow where the last two bucks were at.


We got into the meadow that morning a bit before daylight and Katie immediately saw a deer waking through the meadow but couldn’t make out antlers so we let it go. We heard a few more bugles and a cow and raghorn bull ran across the meadow.



It began to rain pretty hard and we put all our gear on and rode it out under some trees. It turned to sleet or small hail for a bit and we heard a few more distant bugles and could hear the rumble of ATVs in the area but didn’t see any.

When the storm let you we sat another cut and saw nothing else so went back to camp which was maybe only 30 minutes away and took a good nap.

That evening we went up a big higher closer to 11,300 feet and found another cut amongst a series of natural openings and sparser timber on a ridge. It was only 5:30 and we instantly found a herd of deer feeding and one buck picked its head up amongst the does and fawns. He was in velvet and was a nice solid 4 point, maybe a little smaller than the two bucks in the slash we saw the night before, but he would do.

The goats will stay close. I don’t have to tie them up at night but any time I leave them loose I wake up to hear them walking around and eating things, so I prefer that they stay tied up at night. I never leash them when hiking or when hanging around camp.

Ha!

Great story. Can’t wait to hear the rest. Keep it coming!!

Doesn’t get any better than DIY hard ass work!

Good stuff man! Thanks for all your work putting the story/pics up to share. I always look forward to reading these. 👍

One of the very best threads on here! Thanks for the effort...................

Big +1

Fascinating. So they just follow your lead down the trail?

Do you transport them in a horse type trailer? Are using goats as pack animals somewhat common?

Can’t wait for more! One of the best threads ever

Goats are always fun to have around. A friend in WY who is a mule deer super nut has 6-8 of them. We went 10-12 miles into the Wind Rivers one time for golden trout and those goats packed a bunch of beer in for me.

It was so nice of them…

There is a place in Evanston that rents them out to hunters.

Great story, keep it coming

Too cool!!!

Excruciating

All these fellas (including me) waiting with baited breath for the next episode of “As the Goat Roams”.

Right, they just follow. I bottle fed them since they were about 2-3 days old. I don’t use a horse trailer normally, 5 fits ok in the back of my F150 with a stock rack around the sides. When I had 7 it was a bit much and the truck would squat really badly.
I wouldn’t say they are common, but in my my circles they seem more common as pack animals than llamas. They are much friendlier but hate water and are smaller than llamas. So while each individual can’t pack as much, they seem easier to handle to me as you don’t have to physically touch them while hiking.