When you meet a goat, the first thing you’ll want to do is grab his horns.
Don’t grab his horns! He doesn’t like that!
My friend Chris Hunter has goats and he lives with his wife and baby and many other assorted animals in a converted school bus just above Castle Valley. I’m not really sure how the goats started happening, but Chris loves those goats. He mostly has male goats because apparently when people get goats for dairy, they generally “don’t keep” the male babies, which I think you know what that means. So Chris is like a one-man male goat rescue organization.
He takes them for long hikes in the mountains—goats have to stay in shape, you know. For years he’s been planning to train them to carry packs, and one morning when I let him know that Mick Knurbin and I were going to jump Adobe Mesa, which is about 5 minutes from the school bus, he said, “oh great! I just got packs for the goats and I want to take a few of them out with the packs!” There was some suggestion that the goats could use these packs to carry our BASE gear up the hill?!?!?!
Sign me up :)
Turns out, things have to be balanced on both sides of the goat packs..... and the right weight..... and since the whole system was new it required a lot of futzing to set up.
And also, the goats and Chris were not going to come all the way up with us so Chris ended up putting a few water bottles in the goat packs and we carried our BASE gear up the hill.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Also turns out, hiking with goats is incredibly ridiculous and may not be the most efficient the first time or two you do it, because you have to stop every 5 seconds and take photos and video of the goats because they are so funny.
The youngest goat, Sumo, whom Chris apparently brought solely to serve as a “scapegoat” so Basho and Arthur would butt him instead of each other, seemed to want to spend all of his time standing directly in front of me on the talus slope, occasionally nibbling on a dry bush.
I’d hike for about one minute, and then Sumo would be standing in front of me blocking the way. It’s really hard to figure out how to get a goat to move when he’s standing right in front of you—goats are kind of big, and they do have those horns.
At one point, I poked Basho in the butt with my trekking pole because he was also standing in front of me, and then he assumed Sumo had done it and turned around and butted his horns right into Sumo’s horns, which was pretty unnerving!
What if he realized it was me who poked him!!
It’s also pretty hard to hike up a steep hill when you are laughing at goats the entire time.......
In short, hiking with goats is hilarious and I highly recommend it!
Just make sure you’re not in a big rush. Also, Mick and I got to jump, and that was pretty fun too :D
Steph Davis
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