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My friend Matt drew a mountain goat license for a unit that is in the Absoraka Beartooth Wilderness Area, a few miles north of Yellowstone Park. On Thursday Matt, his friend Jake, and I drove up to the trailhead and loaded our gear on a horse I leased for the fall.
The trailhead is at an elevation of 7200 feet. We hiked from there to our camp at the head of Mill Creek, an elevation of around 9300 feet. The air is thin up there and it makes hiking slow.
Friday morning we put our packs on the horse and headed up to near the ridgeline. We tied him up and started the final climb to the top.
We got as high as 10400 feet. The scenery was spectacular.
We had a hard time finding a path through the cliffs but once we made it through, there was a large grassy plateau that was easy to travel on. We started seeing mountain goats.
There was also a fair amount of petrified wood laying here and there.
We saw about thirty mountain goats. Most of them were on the sides of sheer cliffs. A few were in areas that were accessible and eventually Matt stalked one and shot it. It rolled down the mountain a ways then came to a stop in a gully.
It took a few hours to break it down, put it in our packs and hike back to the cliff crossing. We made it through the crossing just as it got dark. For some reason it seemed much harder going back than it was coming through before.
We got back to camp well after dark. The next morning we packed up and headed out.
