Unit G101 (West Cabinet Mountains)

Montana FWP publishes no mountain goat success figure for unit G101 that we can tie to this unit alone, so we won't quote one. The plan: glass from across the basin, judge the climb honestly, and decide whether a hit animal could be recovered.

Glassing from Star Peak, East Fork Peak and Pilik Ridge

Take a position on one of Star Peak (6,155 ft), East Fork Peak (5,993 ft), Pilik Ridge (5,853 ft) and Stanley Peak (5,809 ft) and be on it before light. Work the morning with the air falling away from you, then accept that by mid-morning the wind has reversed and the plan has to change with it. Give a basin forty minutes before you decide it is empty. On the rut hunts, early hunts find goats higher and later hunts find them pushed down by snow.

The way in: State Route 200, Route 56 and Highway 2

We have no road inventory for this unit, so the only routes we can name are the ones Montana FWP draws the boundary with: State Route 200, Route 56 and Highway 2. Those are its edges, not its interior — useful because they are where you leave the pavement, and useless for telling you what the inside is like. Park on the boundary and walk; a unit you can only enter from its rim rewards whoever is willing to leave the truck at the rim.

A first plan from the pins on this page

The map above marks Savage Mountain, Sawtooth Mountain, Billiard Table and Spar Peak as places to see from, and Surprise Draw as ground to watch. Each pin is a named feature verified to fall inside the unit line, not a spot anyone has hunted. Join two of them into a morning: be on the first before light, move to the second once the thermals turn.

What we can't tell you

Some of the ground named above carries no land-status flag we trust, so check ownership on a current layer before you hunt it. We have no mountain goat success figure for this unit that survives checking against Montana FWP's own harvest and hunter counts, and we would rather say so than print a statewide average as though it were measured here.