After 13 years, I finally received a Utah Rocky Mountain Goat tag.  For those of you that might be confused by that first sentence - this isn't Melanie.  This is John putting forth his valiant effort in blogging.  

We flew into Utah on Tuesday as many of you know from Melanie's previous post.  My Dad and I spent most of Tuesday getting ready for our trip.  We spent the afternoon out a Cabela's and sighting in our guns. Wednesday we packed up the horses and headed up the trail above my parents house.  The muzzle loader deer hunt is in full swing so we had big crew.  There were 8 of us, along with 10 horses.  We arrived into our camp below Box Elder peak Wed night.  It was crazy being on a horse again.  Living in Indiana, my butt hasn't seen a saddle for ages.  4 days of horse riding has caused some serious pain!

Thursday morning we got up and rode to the top of South Box Elder.  Thanks to Reed and Sam, we spotted about 8 goats on the East side of Box Elder.  After watching them for a while, I found the one I was going to go for.  I really did luck out with that opportunity opening morning.  We videoed the whole thing.  I was actually really surprised when Melanie suggested putting the video of me shooting my goat on the blog.  For any of you animal rights activists out there, I will spare you the kill scene.  It was pretty sweet though!  While we were skinning the goat Jordan, my 9 year old nephew said, "why do people do this?"  He was pretty grossed out.  We all got a kick out of that and enjoyed having Jord around.  We had a great time.  Besides the goat, we all had opportunities as some big 4 point mule deer.  No thanks to some mishaps in gun cleaning 101, 2 of the muzzle loaders misfired and those big 4 point deer on Box Elder will live another day.  We stayed up there till Saturday.  Enjoy the pics...... or don't enjoy the pics - depends on who you are.