Thank you for the reminder. I’ve been meaning to send an update.
Hunt went very well. I was able to harvest a nice 6 year old Billy and beautiful, albeit rugged country. I’ll try an attach a few photos. I hope any one who draws the tag in the future sees this post and reaches out for information. I’d love to help out. And thank you to all of you that did help me out. I greatly appreciate it.
I’ve been holding off posting because I had grand ambitions of posting an in depth hunt experience / gear review / lessons learned. But I’ve always got something to distract me.
I’ll come back with more in depth overview, but overall I did a bunch of scouting over the summer, not focusing on any particular goats, but more so figuring out access in the units. I saw lots of goats on every scouting trip and I think they were mostly Nannie’s and kids.
Once season came around I was only able to manage time off from work so well and I went up two days prior to season open. I didn’t see anything! Was a bit surprised and the anxiety started to build on this first, and potentially only, once in a lifetime Tag. I guess I had enough maturity and intelligence, but not much lol, to trust my scouting - although it that shadow of the doubt was looming alittle bit. I was fortunate to have a couple hunting buddies come out and share the experience and help out. I highly recommend having a solid partner or two if goat hunting this unit. It is unbelievably rugged and logistically challenging. Depending how you hunt it of course, but my experience was that even for a nannie or immature billy you need to be prepared to climb a couple thousand feet without a good trail. The mature Billie’s I saw were all in the most challenging of terrain at the highest altitudes.
Long story short, for now, I killed my Billy on the sixth morning of hunting in a very challenging area that was about six miles from my ATV which was about 3 miles from the truck. It was a multi day infil and exfil.
I need to score my Billy now that it’s dried and hopefully I can find time to do it. But life has been crazy and honestly score is not very important to me so I haven’t made it a priority. But when I hastily put a tape to it after the kill, he roughly scored around 50. I’ll try to get some pics posted.
I skinned out the whole hide and brought it and the skull to timberline taxidermy in Colorado Springs who had done great work for me in the past. They did a euro on the head which came out great and I’m still waiting on the rug to come back. I really wanted a life size but I don’t have the room in the house.
In closing, if anyone draws this unit I would love to help, just shoot me a DM!
I appreciate all the help I did get from you guys!
I will try to do a more in depth telling of the story to include a mini gear review in the future.
Thank you everyone!
