On a brisk, cloudy morning on Hurricane Ridge, veterinarian Allison Case was whispering soothingly to a baby mountain goat. 

“Hi, buddy, just going to tickle your nose now. That’s a good boy,” she said softly to the mountain goat kid lying on her examining table, as she quickly swabbed his nose to check for disease. 

Minutes earlier, the kid was soaring through the air, towed by a helicopter high over the Olympic Mountains. 

Unfortunately, his blindfold prevented him from enjoying the view. But for the group of veterinarians, biologists, park rangers and volunteers who are working on translocating roughly 700 mountain goats from the Olympic National Park, the goat’s view was not as important as his safety, health and tranquility as he begins new life in the Cascades.

On Sept. 10, years of planning, public comments, researching and organizing culminated in the successful capture of several mountain goats from Klahhane Ridge in the Olympic National Park and their following release in the Cascade Mountains. 

“It was a long process, and it feels really great to have it happen,” said Patti Happe, Wildlife Branch chief at Olympic National Park. “I didn’t really believe it was going to happen until the helicopter landed on Monday morning.” 

History of Olympic Goats

Not native to the Olympic National Park, 12 mountain goats were first introduced to the Lake Crescent area in the 1920s by a local hunting club. 

“We think from the newspaper clippings, they wanted to form a huntable population at some point,” said Hurricane Ridge Resource Educator Janis Burger. “But about 10 years later, Olympic National Park was established and there’s no hunting in national parks.”

Those goats and their descendants were then protected by the park and their numbers spread during the years until there were over 1,000 goats in the park in the 1980s, according to Burger.

“They had spread pretty much all throughout the high country of the park,” Burger said. “Klahhane Ridge had over 200 mountain goats, and in places it smelled like a barnyard.” 

Because of the location of the Olympic Mountains — surrounded by saltwater on three sides, and a river valley on the southern side — the area is home to species of animals, insects and plants that do not exist anywhere else in the world.

The mountain goats were causing problems for native species because of their grazing habits and their tendency to “wallow,” or roll around and kick up dirt, displacing native plants and causing soil erosion.

“Our management mandate is to manage the ecosystems we’re in charge of in as much of the natural functioning state as possible, and that means that non-native species really don’t belong,” Happe said. 

In 1988, the park launched its first attempt to translocate the goats, using salt blocks as bait, tackling goats with nets, trapping with foot snares, and dropping down from helicopters to pull goats off the sides of mountains. Rangers and researchers also tried sterilization and birth control for female goats, which was inefficient due to the fact that the goats had to be captured first. 

According to Burger, who was part of the first effort to remove the goats in the 1980s, in their second year of goat removal, almost 20 percent of the goats died during the capture process. Not only that, but the process was extremely dangerous for the rangers and it was expensive, costing $500 to $1,000 per animal. Still, by the end of their efforts, they had caught more than 400 goats, according to Burger.

The next step of their initial plan, which was to shoot the remaining goats in 1995, never came to fruition, as lack of funding, protests from the public and animal rights groups, as well as political intervention stopped any further action.

A New Attempt

After the first attempt at translocation, the mountain goat population started to slowly grow back to its initial numbers. By the summer of 2018, there were over 700 goats in the park, and their interactions with humans were becoming more and more dangerous. 

In 2010, one interaction became lethal, when Port Townsend’s Bob Boardman was gored by a 370-pound mountain goat while hiking in the Olympic National Park on Oct. 16, 2010.

Boardman’s death brought the mountain goat issue back into the public eye, as friends and family members of the hiker clamored for aggressive mountain goats to be removed from the park. The Olympic National Park was also involved in a lawsuit brought forward by Boardman’s wife, Susan Chadd, although the federal court dismissed the claims and stated that Olympic National Park was not culpable for his death.

Most mountain goats in the Olympic National Park are not particularly aggressive, but according to park officials, they do seek salt from human sweat, urine and food, as there is no natural salt source in the Olympics. 

“They were aggressively seeking salts,” Happe said. “That was causing some dangerous interactions between goats and humans.”

The tragedy in 2010, combined with the threat to endemic species that the goats presented, caused the Olympic National Park to reopen their research in removing the goats. 

Eight years later, the first goats were removed Sept. 10, beginning a three-year process that will once again end with lethal removal of all goats that are too hard to reach for safe transport. 

The Process

With the help of volunteers from Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Northwest Trek Wildlife Park, the Oregon Zoo and Woodland Park Zoo, as well as a contracted helicopter team, the rangers and researchers at Olympic National Park have managed to catch an average of 10 goats each day within their first week of translocation. 

According to Happe, the goat-catching team works tightly together in a specific process that is safe for both humans and goats. First, the pilot navigates to known high-goat density areas, looking for goats in a safe, catchable spot. The pilot will then get as close to a goat as possible, and the capture crew will either shoot a tranquilizer dart at the goat, or shoot a net gun, which releases a net onto the goat. The helicopter will land and let one member of the team out to subdue the animal, by tying the goat’s hooves together (hobbling it) and blindfolding the goat, before putting it in a sling bag. The helicopter then comes back in and pulls the sling bag, with the goat inside, into the air. 

While the dart gun will tranquilize the goat, the team soon reverses the effects so that the goat is not unconscious for the medical check. All goats receive a sedative, to make them more relaxed during the medical check. 

“When those goats go down there to the table, they’re awake, just hopefully a little bit chilled,” Happe said. 

The goats are then medically checked by a team of veterinarians and volunteers. Case, who is a veterinarian with Northwest Trek Wildlife Park, has been put in charge of the kids, giving them a quick check-up, before placing them in crates where they can face their mother, or “nanny,” through a mesh barrier. This way, the kids will not be separated from their mothers when released.

“They’re very healthy goats right now,” Case said. “And I think they’re going to be equally if not more healthy over there.”

The goats are transported in a refrigerated truck, which goes on the Kingston ferry to Darrington. There, they are taken in a helicopter up to a safe habitat, and released into the wild.

“It’s going to be a very similar environment, so it’s going to be easy for them to adapt to,” Happe said. “It’s going to be a new home, they’re going to be disoriented. But they’re going to have a really strong chance of survival.”

As for the goats they cannot catch, Happe said the Park will resort to lethal removal most likely three years from now, for the goats they have no chance of catching without causing further harm to the goat. They will be shot from the air, and their bodies will be left to decompose naturally. 

According to Happe, the park intends to get rid of all the goats, and that the process could end up taking up to 20 years.