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Took a little vacation from blogging while my children and my spouse were home over winter break. I hope everyone had a fine New Year.

My wonderful spouse, Bryan, gave me a wonderful Solstice present: a book called Pack Goat. We already own two goats and we really enjoy them. We plan on breeding them next spring and having them as milk animals. This book opens the possibility of using the goats as pack animals.

This has gotten me very excited. One of the things that worries me about my planned trips is the weight of my back pack. According to this book and the other sources I've been looking at, yearling goats can pack 15-20% of their own weight and more as they grow older. If I can train my goats to carry much of my load, that would be wonderful. Apparently this is an idea that is catching on out west although I haven't seen it here in New England yet.

Goats have some real advantages over other pack animals for hiking. One of the most obvious is their ability to walk wherever a person can go. Given that they're mountain critters as opposed to being grassland critters like horses, they tear up the trail much less and are less likely to hurt themselves. Goats are even in keeping with "Leave no Trace" principles; their scat and hoof prints are deerlike, they're relatively quiet, and although they will eat trail side plants, their preference is for woody stems and weeds like dandelion.

I have two goats, both female. One is too old to learn to pack, but the younger one is still young enough that I'm going to try. We plan to breed them in Feb so that the kids will be due in July. Then I intend to hand raise the kids so that I can start training them right away. I might not have a pack goat for this summers sections of the LT, but hopefully for the sections I intend to cover in the summer of '08, I will have a four footed hiking partner or two.