Trail Tales-Goats At The Robins

As an old friend and I were climbing the rooty way up to the Robin Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness one wet morning, he was telling me about this lakes basin ongoing problem with domesticated mountain goats. He liked to exaggerate when telling a story, so I took this fact with a grain of salt. After gaining the lake’s basin, we found a nice slab on top of a small butte that made an ideal, clean bivy spot for a couple of nights. That is when I saw three of them coming up the hill in our direction. Up until now, I always thought of goats as quiet, reclusive animals that avoided all contact with humans when ever possible. This was not the case for these three however, they decided to take a load off only a few feet from my bivy and watched us resoundingly. It turns out they were after our urine, which is not uncommon for mountain animals because the salt it contains is hard to come by  in alpine areas. They would follow us waiting for that “magic moment” and try to drink the stuff before it even hits the ground, coming uncomfortably close to me and getting an aggressive look in their eyes. That night, about 2 a.m, when I was going to the bathroom the “white ghosts” appeared and scared me half to death as I was only using starlight to see, I thought “what they never sleep?”. The following day we climbed Granite Mountain and on the way down to camp, we saw them scoping us out on the slopes high above the lake and they quickly ran back up to wait for us from the lake’s outlet. To this day, I have never seen another animal act this way towards me.