“Where the Mountains Rule: A Goat Hunt in BC”
The thought of this hunt began in January of 2023. Each of us wanted to add a mountain hunting experience and adventure to our portfolio. At that time, we decided that mountain goat would be the species of choice. Fast forward to January of 2025…it was time to start preparing and getting in shape. The flat lands of southern Indiana look much different than the terrain that we knew we would encounter in British Columbia.
We were based in a camp along a lake and would glass the surrounding mountains each morning in search of mountain goats in an accessible location. Each of us had a mountain goat tag in our pocket and we fully expected the trip / hunt would entail multiple hikes into the mountain to fill our tags.
The morning of our success, we spotted three goats approximately 4 to 5 miles away. Two of these goats appeared to be mature billy’s with the third being a younger billy (tough to fully tell at that distance but we were confident they were billy’s). Due to the distance, we decided to look up into a few more bowls to see if other mountain goats presented themselves before committing to the three goats originally spotted; none were found.
Around 11:00 a.m. we relocated the three mountain goats originally spotted earlier in the morning and decided it was time to make a pursuit. The first mile of the hike largely involved bush whacking through a combination of willows, dense valley forest, and ground balsam. We then began our ascent to gain elevation and get above tree line. The shear steepness of the terrain that we battled for the next several hours was something none of us had experienced before. In total, we hiked about 5.5 miles and gained nearly 3,000 feet of elevation over a 6-hour period to finally get within range of the mountain goats.
To our delight, there were in fact two mature billy’s and one adolescent in the group. We proceeded to get set up and went through the process of making sure each of us knew which mountain goat we were aiming at and stepped through the 1-2-3 shoot game plan
It worked like a charm! A few minutes later, we had two mountain goats down! And they rolled to within 10-ft of each other! Upon our arrival, we realized that we not only killed two billy’s but, two old billy’s. The one with the curled horn killed by myself was aged at 12 years old, the other killed by Chandler Lambring was aged at 9 years old. We were ecstatic as the thought of doubling on mountain goats had never really crossed our mind…little lone in a place that we could recover and take pictures together!
Little did we know that our adventure was just beginning. As you can imagine, capping and breakdown two mountain goats takes some time. By the time we had shot and recovered the mountain goats it was already approaching 7 p.m..... A few hours later and it was nearly dark by the time we had our packs loaded for the trip out. We began the decent with our headlamps on but, just a short distance, we realized that it was going to be unsafe for us to fully traverse off the mountain in the dark. Around 11 p.m. we decided to call it quits for the night and wait for daylight to finish our trek back to the boat and basecamp.
A night on the mountain would have been perfectly fine if we had planned for it. When we began our approach to the mountain goats, we did not expect it to take as long as it did (truthfully, they were further away than we originally thought); Therefore, we were not prepared with the gear one would typically pack for an overnight spike camp. Also, we were unable to make it back to tree line so there were no provisions to make a campfire. As such we layered with everything we had in our pack and “settled” in for the night. It was a sleepless 6-7 hours that saw each of us pacing a small bench back and forth to stay warm until daylight.
The next morning, we were able to continue the hike off the mountain. Each of our packs weighed nearly 100 pounds and it was a long 5-hour hike back to the boat we had parked at the edge of the lake the day before.