Mountain Goat Hunting Guides and Outfitters – Trips and Hunts

The Rocky Mountain Goat lives in many mountainous regions about the timberline and is where you will most likely have to hunt this big game. They are from 3 to 3 ½ feet high at the shoulder, are from 4 to about 6 feet long, and weigh from about 100 to 300 pounds. The Billy {mail goat} tend to be somewhat larger than the Nanny {female goat}. The Mountain Goat is a compact, chunky, short-legged big game animal with a suit of dense yellowish or white fur with an overcoat that is long and shaggy in the winter and shorter in the summer. Both sexes have a beard that is about five inches long, and sharply tipped backward-curving black horns. The horns are about a foot long in the male and some 9 inches in the females.

Throughout the year the Rocky Mountain goat moves up and down the mountains with the season, migrating to lower altitudes in the winter. The hunting guides or outfitters you hire should know the best times of the year to plan out a trip or guided hunt for this big game animal. The hooves have a hard outer rim surrounding a rubbery inner surface, providing excellent traction. Both the male and female have small black hoofs. This big game does not appear to be as intelligent, nor as impressive or graceful as the mountain sheep.

Rocky Mountain goats look like a goat, but it is not a true goat. Like the chamois, it is more closely related to the antelope family. It lives high in the Rocky Mountains, and it’s perhaps the best mountain climber among American animals. Making hunting trips or hunts a grand experience if you pick the right outfitter or guide for the area you will be in.

Wild Goats: There are 10 species of wild goats that live in mountains and rocky places. They are divided into two groups, the ibexes and the goats proper. All except the Rocky Mountain wild goat live in Europe and the Himalaya Mountains in Asia.

Most of the Rocky Mountain goats feeding activity are in the morning and evening or on bright moonlit nights. On a warm day, they may bed down during the late morning and afternoon. Their feeding follows a seasonal pattern. In the summer, they eat grasses, sedges, and other warm-weather plants and in the winter, moss, lichens, and year-round woody plants. Each male mountain goat prefers to be alone except during the November mating season.

Mountain Goats form small herds of separate sexes until the mating season, which extends form November to January. Males do not usually engage in fights over females. The skull bones and horns are fragile compared to those of other hoofed mountain animals such as Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep. Butting battles would likely result in injury. They do adopt threatening postures. Males sometimes mark or claim a female by rubbing it with musky oil that is secreted from a gland at the base of the horns. The nanny produces one kid, or often twins, in May or June.

Mountain goats live in the northern Rocky Mountains from Cook Inlet, Alaska, south through the providences of Canada, which include Northwest Territory, Yukon, Alberta, and British Columbia. There are many hunting guides and outfitters that offer this big game in their list of animals that they hunt. The Rocky Mountain goat can also be found in other parts of North America such as Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado and Montana. Mountain goats are even found in Hawaii. You can also find a outfitter or guide that offers trips or hunts in these areas as well.

Mountain Goats trot with apparent ease across ledges, rocky outcrops, cliffs and ledges. Although they are remarkably sure-footed and able to move in areas that many predators could not negotiate including hunters, they do sometimes fall to their death. The major predators are the mountain lions {also known as the cougar} at lower altitudes and golden eagles in the peaks. Predators usually go after the young.

Scientific Classification: The Rocky Mountain goat belongs to the family Bovidae. It is genus Oreamnos, species O. americanus.

Tips for Mountain Goat Hunting