Goat Hunting

The dappled mountains south of the Stikine River. After enjoying the scenery for some time I thought we may as well go walk down a ridge in search of goats since there was no guarantee that this beautiful weather continuing, in fact the forecast called for worsening conditions.

Posing with my trusty old rifle in hand. A little bit past this point we saw our first goats. A small group of three way down in the valley behind me. Wait, there are five. No, I see nine... There is another two over there... Okay, it finally ended up being nineteen goats in the valley but all of them were nannies, kids, and yearlings from what we could see.

It wasn't much longer and we spotted a billy in front of me right on the ridge. I started stalking it and would sneak ahead as Merlin would watch for the goat, then I would signal for him to come as I would watch for it. After the initial sighting we didn't get a glimpse of it for a while. This picture was taken while we were stalking the goat. Unfortunately the wind was not in our favor and as we got close to the spot where the billy was located I looked to my left and saw the billy moving rapidly down the hill, already out of range. At least it was the first evening of hunting. I watched him for a while and then looked back up the ridge...

Where this guy was looking back at me. I scooted ahead to rest on a rock and took a shot. Although the shot was in the vitals a couple shots were necessary to put him down so he wouldn't try to walk on a ledge where he may have fallen. We were just above a large notch that led to the Popof Glacier, about 1500 feet below (Yikes! not a good place to slip). Finished boning him out around 11pm or maybe a little later (my watch decided to quit working). As we started hiking back we noticed something in the sky. It was a faint display of northern lights. They eventually increased their brightness and would shoot up into the sky silhouetting Castle Mountain and the rest of the mountain range. Even for a relatively small display it was very spectacular because of the mountains. In addition, the August meteor shower was occurring, by the time we reached our camp (about midnight) the skies had cleared making it a perfect night to sleep outside and watch the meteor shower and enjoy the northern lights, which is exactly what I did. I didn't fall asleep until the dawn started invading the horizon.