Pepper Fisher

PORT ANGELES – The process of removing non-native mountain goats from the Olympic Peninsula has reached another milestone. Olympic National Park officials announced Monday that the ground-based lethal removal phase is complete, with teams of volunteers culling 31 mountain goats from the park.

This latest phase follows 2 years of translocating a total of 325 mountain goats into the Cascade Mountains using dart guns and helicopters. The remaining animals were deemed too elusive for that method. In September and October, 99 highly skilled volunteers, organized in 20 groups of three-to-six per group, volunteered over 9000 hours to track and kill a total of 31 mountain goats, often in extreme conditions.

Volunteers had to pass a rigorous evaluation process, including requirements for physical fitness, background checks and a mandatory firearm proficiency evaluation. Working in high elevations, the teams faced dense smoke from fires, heavy rain, strong winds, snow, sleet, lightning, wasps, and persistent low clouds and fog.

Lethal removal will now switch to aerial operations, or hunting by helicopter, in the summer of 2021.

Mountain goats are not native to the Olympic Peninsula. They were introduced in the 1920s by hunting groups before the National Park was established. Their effects on the Park environment and the dangers they pose to Park visitors has long been a problem. The publicly-approved effort to move them to their native habitat in the North Cascades Mountain Wilderness, where their numbers are dwindling, resulted in the translocation of 325 mountain goats.