Trip Report for Avoss Lake Goat Forage Research Project

Darrin Kelly and myself, Sitka Conservation Society volunteer Stacey Woolsey, were dropped off at the East end of Lake Avoss at noon on Saturday September 10th. Harris Air pilot Mark Hackett noted that the ceiling that had forced the trip to be delayed from mid August, was finally lifting. Mark headed down the lake to pick up three passengers at the cabin just after dropping us off and Darrin remarked that the cabin had not been rented.

Darrin and I had a quick lunch and then headed up hill towards the ridge that circles the lake. It was easy going with little tree cover or brush and a fairly gentle slope.

We saw our only bear sign of the trip halfway up the ridge and stopped to collect a sample and mark the spot on our GPS. Phil Mooney, the Sitka area Wildlife Biologist from Fish and Game, had asked us to collect bear scat to help determine if the bears were eating goats. We also saw a moderate amount of deer sign and took a sample along with some nearby browse to help Phil determine if the deer were targeting the same plants as the goats. We took our time getting to the top, stopping to glass the ridge on the other side of the Lake from every vantage. We saw no goats, bear or deer. We stopped at the top of the ridge to set up camp at 5:00. The Lake Avoss cabin was immediately below us and just beyond the ridge narrowed and became quite rocky making it look inhospitable for camping. More glassing from the campsite and early to bed for me while Darrin stayed out late to take pictures of an amazing sunset to the east and a full moon rising above mount Ada to the west.

View of our route up the ridge

Day Two We broke camp and were hiking by mid morning. We had a good vantage of the hillsides on the opposite side of Whale bay and spent some time glassing for goats with no luck.

We jumped up a couple of deer and were impressed by how quickly they disappeared down the steep and rocky hillside leading to the cabin. I wouldn’t want to try and climb up the route they descended. These were the only deer we say on the trip which was remarkable in that had we been hiking a similar distance in the alpine of North Baranof of Chichigof islands, we would have encountered dozens of deer over the course of three days. As we moved inland the the terrain became rockier and the vegetation sparser, it was easy to see why the deer favored the lower elevations. A few hundred yards past the deer, we had our second wildlife encounter of the trip. We were both impressed by the camouflage ability of these Ptarmigan

Darrin glassing for goats with the Greater Arm of Whale Bay below

(there are four total).

At this point we had hiked almost midway around the ridge circling Lake Avoss and were approaching the land bridge that linked this ridge with the next set of mountain tops. We had to hike down to 1700 feet to catch the bridge and it was tough going with lots of boulders to navigate.

We were excited to get moving however, because we finally spotted our first goat of the trip: a lone sentinel bedded down on a ledge just below the peak on the other side of the land bridge. We had no choice but to approach him in full view because there was only one route across. I made it down to the start of the land bridge and looked back to see how Darrin was doing. He had stopped midway down the hill and was waving at me and pointing ahead. I didn’t need the binoculars to see the little group of goats heading our way. There were three of them and they were already halfway across before I noticed them. Amazing that we had not picked them out earlier with our diligent glassing. We scooted behind some rocks, took off our packs, and tried to blend in the hopes they would keep coming our way. They disappeared behind a rise and it did not reemerge and we were worried they had caught our scent until we noticed then just below grazing on the hillside. Looking at this picture it is hard to believe they navigated down that steep hillside so quickly, but as we watched they began to move straight up towards us stopping to munch along the way. We identified a nanny with a very young kid and an adolescent kid. I flattened myself against the back of a boulder with only my binoculars peeking around the side. Darrin was sitting about twenty feet above me in some brush. The goats kept coming, completely oblivious to our presence. The nanny was so close I could hear her breathing when she finally stopped and looked at me. Her smaller kid took this opportunity to try and nurse, but she was having none of that and when Darrin shifted to get a better view, she startled and took off back down the ridge with the kids in tow.

We watched the goats race up the next hill and vanish over the top before attempting to backtrack their grazing route. Because we had watched them progress up the hill, it was easy to find the places where they had stopped to eat. We bagged fresh sign and took samples of the plants that had been newly clipped by the goats. One succulent growing in a seep that they seemed especially attracted to turned out to be red stemmed saxifrage. Phil was interested to learn about the goats foraging on saxifrage as that had not turned up during his research on North Baranof. Two hours and many plant samples later, we made it to the top of the peak where we had first spotted the single goat bedded down. He turned out to be a mature billy and he watched our progress up the last fifty yards of a well worn goat trail with growing alarm. By the time we at the top and able to glass the ridges in both directions, the billy was gone. We

were able to spot the nanny and two kids about two miles down the ridge.

The nanny led her charges up this hill in a matter of minutes.

Well Worn Goat Trail

Our path inland took us in the opposite direction of the goats, so we turned down the ridge and started looking for a place to make camp. We couldn’t resist pitching our tent by this beautiful lake halfway and were rewarded with another scenic evening.

Day Three

The terrain at this point was rock slabs with the remnants of ice fields on the north side of the ridge. We were fortunate to have dry weather so the rock provided good traction.

Darrin on the third morning with Mount Ada in the background.

Despite the open country and diligent glassing, we saw no more goats.

We did, however, find ample evidence that goats had been living on the ridges we passed. There were clear trails like this one leading to water.

At the final ridge we traversed, we found goat wallows in the sand.

We also found areas in the brush along the sides of the ridge where the goats had bedded down so often, they had worn the greenery off the plants and left clumps of winter coat tangled in the woody brush.

We descended to 1500 feet and started seeing deer sign again. We were able to gather quite a few plant samples and found areas that had been browsed aggressively by either deer or goats. Our last camp was about 700 feet above the lake where the plane

was scheduled to arrive at 1:00 the next day.

We decided to have a granola bar for breakfast and get the lake early so we could relax and cook oatmeal and coffee. Sadly, the way down was treacherous. Slippery, wet moss covered the rocks and there were few trees to hang on to. We tried several routes off the side of the ridge, but were cliffed out again and again. Eventually, we started leaving our packs at the top so we would not be tempted to attempt a risky route to avoid climbing back up. By staying in trees, we were finally able to find a way down to a spot that let us traverse over to the lake. It involved much crawling through brush and lowering ourselves through bushes, but it was safe. We arrived at the lake moments before the plane landed.

I had brought along a flare pistol and was able to fire off a flare as the plane came over, letting the pilot know where we were in all the tree cover. Our flight out gave us a sobering look at what those “cliffed out” areas turned into had we kept going.

We arrive back in Sitka at 1:45 on the 14th of September and delivered our plant samples, bags of scat, plant photos, a map of our route, and a log of the GPS coordinates for all of our samples and plant pictures to Phil Mooney at the Fish and Wildlife office. He was able to identify all but the Red Stemmed Saxifrage on sight and included our findings in his larger study of Goats and their habitat on Baranof Island. He appreciated this close up view of goat activity in the South Baranof Wilderness area as he would have been unable to conduct the study using a helicopter, which is his standard practice.