I'm back everyone! Awesome trip to BC for goats. I will start with some observations and some lessons learned.
1. BC is a wet place. We had weather daily but even on dry days the brush causes issues. Buy the best you can get. I showed up with rain gear that needed some work.
2. Boots: see above. Mine were ok. I used a set of gaiters from KUIU that were good to me.
3. Fitness: I worked 2 hours a day at least 5 days a week to train for 5 months. I needed more. It was a hellacious physical grind hiking in 3-5 miles to glass then climbing 2000 vertical to get on goats. We were unable to trailer the horses and get into spots because the logging roads are bad when weather hits.
4. Mental. The old quote by Yogi Berra was "Baseball is 90% mental the other half is physical." Between the weather, the climbs, the almost was and could have beens on stalks, the time away from family, and the strain of trying to kill an animal that lives at the top of the world can be tough. Just don't quit. Tell yourself you won't and you won't. If you never quit, you won't know you can. It was tough mentally to stay in the game.
Ok so I landed in Calgary and got picked up the following day by my guide Troy. We visited as we drove the 3 hours to Golden BC and prepared for the next 10 days. He puts his hunters up in a B&B with great breakfasts and suppers when not camping on the mountain. Lucky or unlucky the weather sucked! We couldn't go out with the horses and our one attempt at a biovac was snowed out.
Day 1: hiked in 2 hours and found our first goat high on a ledge looking down like some Olympic god on us mere mortals. We decided it wasn't reachable so we hiked to the next valley and found 4 more, nannies and kids. Two more slides later and we had found 2 billies way up high. We marked those for later. At the end of the day we had covered 10 miles and glassed to our eyeballs hurt...at least mine did.
On the walk out we saw a bull elk, a few grouse, and a black bear. I ate all kinds of berries on the walk: huckleberries, raspberries, and a few Saskatoon berries. That first day...man I had some high hopes!
Day 2: socked in
Basically it was a sucky day! Rain, fog, zero visibility. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face anywhere near a mountain. We tried glassing all the peaks. Nothing! I did have a bird tag and hares were open. So I did what I do: improvise! At the end of the day I had enough for a gumbo! I borrowed a little goat from our host to make it with all the local proteins that I'd be hunting
*Proteins
Wasn't too shabby! Turned out some French bread and rice to give them a little southern cooking.
Topic: Mountain Goats Wisdom (Read 3621 times)
