“I’d think, ‘Find a little handhold and then find a place for my foot and then find another handhold and I’ll keep going.’ I was about a half-mile from where I should have gone up.”

By sunrise, Darrel Ries clung to the face of a mountain on a narrow ledge carved from the granite by wind, rain and snow. He was out of handholds, and there was no way down. “I had just a 2-foot ledge I could sit on. I had enough room for my feet to be in front of me and my arm back in the hole behind me. I was holding on for dear life. I don’t even like to be on a ladder.”

Getting Started

In 2008, 8,571 hunters applied for one of Oregon’s Rocky Mountain goat tags. One of the lucky eight tag winners was 53-year-old Darrel Ries, a chiropractor from Bend, Ore. With three months to get ready, his training ground became Paulina Peak in central Oregon. The three-mile hike gains 2,000 feet, close to what he was likely to encounter in goat country.

In a straight line, Cusick Mountain, where Darrel would hunt, is 11 miles south from Wallowa Lake. The trail from the lake is the shorter of the two ways in, but it is steep with switchbacks where one stirrup of a horseback hunter will hang out over thin air. The longer trail follows the Imnaha River and has its own share of switchbacks, but the elevation change is spread out.

Darrel swung into the saddle on a September morning. With him were Russ Morris, of La Grande, Ron (Bino) Bennett, from Portland, and the outfitter, whose job it was to deposit the hunters and their camp in a meadow, then return eight days later to pick them up.

Both Russ and Bino had competed in triathlons. Bino’s mountain climbing skills were to prove helpful.

The pack string followed the middle fork of the Imnaha River, up, up, up. Once, above a pool in the river, hundreds of miles from the ocean, Darrel looked down to see two salmon in the clear water. The riders picked their way along cliff walls and crevasses that dropped hundreds of feet. In the high country, the trail flattened out, and they passed a large burn then skirted Marble Mountain to a meadow at the base of Cusick Mountain.

Darrel had one day to scout. In the morning, he saw an enormous goat. Its body was massive, his hair yellow and longer than the other goats. The big billy’s horns were visibly larger, even a mile-and-a-half away. As the three men watched, the King fed across the granite cliff and disappeared into a rock formation they dubbed “the throne.”

“Every day we saw five to ten goats,” Darrel said. “We figured they came down the mountain to feed in the meadows after dark and returned to the cliffs at sunrise.”

The Hunt

It took an hour-and-a-half for Darrel to reach his stand in the dark. When the sun came up, he stripped off his backpack and coat, left them behind and climbed higher.

Suddenly, Darrel noticed a group of goats climbing up the side of the mountain. He thought the King was with them, but for 45 minutes he was unable to move because another goat had spotted him. Eventually, all the goats moved out of sight. Darrel followed their trail up and over the top.

Back at camp, Russ and Bino worried. Bino climbed the mountain, found Darrel’s backpack and assumed the worst. Russ and Bino began to search for a body in the canyons below. Darrel found his friends minutes before they called for help on the satellite phone.

Before dawn on day two, free-climbing with his rifle and 30-pound pack, Darrel ran out of options on a narrow ledge. He couldn’t go up or down. He reached Russ on the radio. It took Russ an hour to locate the chiropractor hanging on by his fingers.

Two hours later, Bino climbed around Darrel and tied one end of a 200-foot rope to a twisted hemlock.

“Ten feet above was a gnarled tree stuck in the rock,” Darrel said. “I didn’t know if it would hold us or not.”

Bino gave Darrel the harness and then tied his own out of rope. Then Bino showed Darrel how to rappel down the cliff.

On the third day, on the backside of the mountain, the big billy was in range. Darrel found a rest, but missed the shot, his bullet hit high over the animal’s back. Later he realized he forgot to compensate for the angle.

On the fourth day, the team saw a group of goats on the mountain. One of the young goats tumbled 200 yards down the hillside. It lay still. For a few minutes, the nanny watched. Finally, the group moved off. About an hour later, the kid got up, shook himself and joined the rest of the group.

On the fifth day, no goats were seen from camp. Darrel crept over the snow at the ridge top, looked into the next basin and saw seven goats. Startled, they took off at a run. Russ and Bino located the group with two billies at the top of the next ridge. Neither of the two males was the King, but Darrel made a decision take the 321-yard shot. He settled in behind the rifle, centered the crosshair. The bullet hit rock, but the goat took only five steps and stopped. Darrel held lower for the second shot.

The hunter found a narrow trail to his white-robed trophy. At the top of the world, he ran his fingers through the long hair and looked out across snow-capped peaks that stretched in every direction.

When Russ and Bino joined him, they removed the hide and divided meat into packs, cooled with snow from the canyon. That night, under the light of a full moon, they feasted on backstrap.

Somewhere on the mountain, flat rocks shifted beneath hardened hooves and shale creaked like broken glass. Between knife-edged black granite and darkened sky, the King was secure in his throne.

To order a signed copy of Hunting Oregon, send $19.80 (includes S & H) to Gary Lewis Outdoors, PO Box 1364, Bend, OR 97709 or visit www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.