OK, here's the abbreviated hunt report. The executive summary is that it was an absolute blast. We ended up extending our trip two days since the hunting was hard and we lost time to weather and days off having fun with the family.
We took three days to get to the unit from WA, spending a day and a half visiting in-laws in Jackson. It was great fun and I ended up rucking up the in town ski hill just to get some exercise in. On the way out of town, we hit an excellent rifle range that had steel out to 800 yards. We verified zero on both rifles, 200 yards. I ran through my turret marks for 100, 200, 300, and 400 hitting an 8" gong. My daughter was on point, putting a group about an inch at 200 yards. Most days, she can now outshoot me which is pretty cool.
On the morning of the opener, we drove the unit with a couple of short hikes. The main goal was to get the lay of the land and figure out where we could get access. Onx on my phone again proved it's worth. We had a few chances at a buck and does, but my daughter is very conservative and they ended up trotting off before we could get a shot.
The next few days settled into a routine of morning hunting, fun family stuff during the day and then an evening hunt. It took 2-3 days to start patterning them and narrowing down the unit to 2-3 spots the goats really like. We did tons of hiking and had several opportunities. Again, my daughter takes a fair amount of time to get set up and on the goats and will only shoot when she is 100% sure of herself. We end up "missing" tons of opportunities, but I encourage her to only pull the trigger when she can live with the results. Over time, she is getting better and the encounters and time spent together mean more to us than taking a risky shot and having a bad experience. I established a rule that I was not going to shoot until she did.
Mid week, we ended up getting rain and the roads turned to garbage. I still have several pounds of Wyoming under my truck despite spending $20 at the self wash. I did a few solo hunts thinking I could quickly fill my tags, but apparently the goats don't like rain any more than the rest of my family.
Day 6 started with me finding a walk-in area with a tiny chunk of state land adjacent to it - maybe 1/4 of a section. The area isn't visible from the road even though it wraps around the area due to a few hills and valleys. We found a nice water hole with ridiculous amount of recent sign. The cool part was there was a nice ridge overlooking the valley with a 200 yard shot. We hiked to the top of the ridge where we had nice visibility into several drainage that feed into the water hole. We set up one shooting station and then another observation spot where we could watch for animals moving toward the hole.
After about an hour, the parade started with a small doe/fawn herd with a single mediocre buck. Behind them was a second herd of about 10, then another herd and another. They merged into a herd of over 30 which was an awesome sight to have them all to ourselves with no other hunters within at least 5 miles.
The full herd again split as they moved toward the water and a group of 6 bucks split off and hit the water. They wouldn't give a nice broadside shot, but then started up the hill about 45 degrees off our position. When they hit a bench about 80 yards away I thought we were golden, but my daughter had a tough time figuring out what animal was where and when to shoot - an awesome problem in my book. I tried to guide here to several shots, but frustration took over and they wandered up and over the ridge.
We followed them for a short period of time, but they ended up off public land so we ran back to the shooting spot and waited. Luckily, another mini-herd fed over the public line to the water hole. There was two doe/fawn groups a dink buck that was probably 1.5 years and old man dandy buck. We lined up on him at about 200 yards and waited for him to go sideways, which he seemed to know he shouldn't do. Finally, he went sideways for about 1.5 seconds and then bedded facing away. Here is the view we had for an hour.
We debated taking a doe, but they both had fawns (violating family antelope rule #1) and we were confident dandy buck would eventually make a mistake. Finally, he stood up, went to the water and gave us a perfect broadside. My daughter lined up and sent one. The buck did the hop, kick thing that gave me confidence he was hit hard. He took a half dozen steps and I mentioned he was about to go down - only he then looked around and started walking. I told my daughter to rack another round and get back on him which she did very well. I noticed red on his right front leg right below the knee join - pretty much my worst nightmare to have my daughter wound an animal.
Her second shot had no effect and I didn't see it miss. Now, as a parent I am going into damage control mode. I range him at 250, click the safety off and take a less than optimal shot as he is walking at a fairly good clip. Again, no effect. I rack another, range at 310 and let the fourth shot fly. Nothing and he is now running mach 2 and passing other goats in the herd!? He was now off public land and I watched him until he went around the corner and appeared to be pretty much unwounded even though I know I saw blood.
We gathered the family and searched for blood and the goat for a couple hours until it was too dark to continue. We didn't find any blood and I glassed from the ridge and was sure he wasn't piled up anywhere within sight. It's fairly hard to hide a white goat in sage country, so I was as confident as possible he wasn't down anywhere near. Not having access to where he ran was tough, this was the first animal either of us that we shot at that didn't go down quickly. She shot a mule deer last year that made it 10 yards and all of my previous kills were one shot clean kills.
As one can imagine, our confidence was pretty rocked by shooting four times and not having something on the ground. I replayed the scene over and over trying to figure out what happened.
The next day, we hit BLM land near town to see if the rifles were somehow off. It turns out I goofed and her rifle was zeroed for 100 yards when I thought it was at 200. Doing the math, she was about 13 clicks low. Combining this with the steep down angle and me forgetting to tell her to aim a bit higher pretty much explains that her crosshairs were dead on and the old man was 100% to blame. My rifle was on and I am sure I just missed at a moving target at a fair range, probably to be expected.
Day 5 pm was pretty uneventful, not much to report. Day 6 was a repeat. Day 7 was again a few decent opportunities with no shot.
Day 8, the last stand, started as usual. We did a few hikes and couldn't scratch up the herd or anything but doe/fawn pairs. We drove from magic spot 1 to spot two when a lone doe jumped in front of the truck and up the hillside onto public land. I looked at my daughter and she said she was done with quick road attempts, so I grabbed my rifle and headed out - when I hear this yelling and screaming. I'm probably not the first guy that forgot to put his truck in park, but I was laughing my butt off as I was running downhill to jump in and hit the brakes.
Somehow, the lone doe is just standing there at about 50 yards watching the circus. Luckily, there was a draw right off the road that gave me the chance to move off the road and about 40 yards closer. By the time I snuck up to the ridge, she had moved up a bit more but was only about 150 from me. I set up and fired and she dropped in her tracks. That was probably the best feeling I have after the ugly volley a few days ago. We quickly brought her back, gutted, quartered and got her on ice. Having the truck hitch winch and family to help made it almost too easy.
By now, we had about 2 hours of shooting light left so we thought we would drive to the magic spot just in case. Low and behold, a nice 5-6 animal herd was nearby on private land but looking like they wanted over to the magic spot. We unloaded and entered public from the opposite side. Having a week of hunting really paid off as I knew just how to get within shooting range of where I figured they were going. The wind was perfect and we set up an ambush and waited. I was constantly glassing and finally saw horns moving over the top of sage.
We turned about 20 degrees and finally Mr. Buck shows himself, and he is a real dandy - the best one we have seen all week. He was moving with purpose and my daughter was having trouble getting a shooting lane through the sage. She looked at me and said that she can't get a shot and I really needed to break the shoot second rule. It was hard to do, but I lined up just as he paused and gave me a perfect angle. The 200 yard shot found it's mark and he took about four steps and was done.
Just like that, I notice a doe start running towards us - I mean like on a string right at us. My daughter lines up and then looks up and says that she isn't going to shoot it. I ask why and she says that after looking at it in the scope, for some reason she just wasn't going to shoot that particular animal. She looked confident and sure of herself, so I lined up and dropped the doe at about 40 yards. My two shots probably weren't 45 seconds apart and somehow I had just filled all three of my tags in maybe 2 hours.
We check out the buck and man, he is everything I wanted, perfect symmetry, nice size and really good shape. We drag him back to the doe and pull out the radios to call my wife over with the truck. She asks "did you get one?" I replied, "No, we didn't get one." I can tell she is bummed as she parks over a small ravine. I ask her to pull forward 1/4 mile as I don't want to drag the game cart through the ravine and the mood in the truck improves dramatically.
We load both on the game cart, move them over to some flat land by the road and start the process. As I go to gut the buck, I notice a mark on his leg the same time my wife does and as I look at it we both realize it is the same buck my daughter hit two days earlier. Amazingly, it only resulted in a flesh wound about the size of a quarter. The bone wasn't damaged, just a chunk of skin missing. The buck licked it all clean but it was 100% clear that the would was very, very fresh. At that point, we decided we needed to shoulder mount this guy.
The rest of the processing went quickly via headlamp and both kids fell asleep in the truck as I finished up. We headed home, dropped the cape and head off at Nature's Way and I am still amazed at how fortunate we are to have a trophy that both my daughter and I can claim. The whole family was involved between driving, scouting, spotting, shooting, hauling and processing.
I measured him at 75 or 76 and the only thing keeping him out of the books is he is a bit short on length. Mass and cutters measure great, but he is a bit short in overall length. That said, for me to bring my family on a DIY public land hunt on a unit we can draw with one point and bring home a fantastic animal like that puts this hunt in our record book for sure.
