The first time I told him about the domestic goat I’d seen hanging out on the bluffs above Colorado Highway 82, my son didn’t believe me. So I sent him a photo — not a very good one, but proof.

Ted remained dismissive: “It’ll be gone in two weeks,” he predicted. An outdoorsperson and hunter since childhood, he thought of predators. 

“No,” I said stoutly. “It’s been there for years.” 

I didn’t know if the goat was a he or she, and I still don’t. But I’d seen a goat on the chalky-looking bluffs a few miles out of Carbondale, on the northeast side of the roadway across from Aspen Glen.

The next week Ted sent me an image of the goat. An acknowledgement. 

Many of us looked for that goat: domestic, whiter than the bluffs, seen often in the folds of the loose hillside just down valley from a stationary yellow train car. 

‘A little good-luck charm’

“Seeing it was like a little good-luck charm,” said Adley Kent Larimer of Carbondale, who recalls first spotting the goat in 2019 or 2020. She and her husband had been surprised, thought it looked odd, out of place. After that, both started watching for it. 

Larimer said, “I worked in Glenwood from January 2021 to October 2023, drove by every day. I would see it most days at least once.” At times she had no sightings for as much as two weeks.  “Then it would come back and pop over the hill.”

When I tried to describe the animal to others, they’d ask if it was a mountain goat. But local lore said this was a domestic goat who’d escaped. 

In the fall I heard the goat had a name: Billy. I’m going with that, though it occurred to me it might be Billie.

You could see Billy well, even against beige-and-tan talus, different in that section from the surrounding stretches of red. My husband, Mike, first pointed the goat out, and I usually saw it under the tallest promontory, a big white prow of rock.

Loads of residents quietly followed the goat. Last November a friend bought a salt-mineral block, to help Billy through the winter, and carried it up to the scree.  

“That’s Billy,” people would say.

“His name is Larry,” they also said.

When friends moved here from Boulder, I encouraged their 9-year-old son, Oliver, to keep an eye out for Billy, a fun mission for a kid.

The answer no one wanted

Then this year, I came up empty. I kept trying, even doubling back on the highway if I spaced out and forgot to look. I remembered how other times Billy had seemed to disappear, yet emerged anew—like hope, springing eternal.

“I haven’t seen the goat in a long time,” I told Mike in concern.

No sooner had I said it than someone on a community forum popped the question. Anyone know what’s happened to the goat by the train car?  

We got the answer nobody wanted, when Larimer posted that in early March she’d seen a still form on the hillside in a lower spot than usual, and pulled over. Her post said she’d returned a week later with binoculars “to confirm. So sad! We’ve been watching him for several years and always loved when we were able to spot him.”

No! I stared, slumped in my chair. We always look—well, looked—for him. So did friends and coworkers, so did parents and grandparents with their little ones; so did some high-school students I talked to.

Larimer repeated online that she’d returned with binoculars, “just to really make sure, and he was definitely deceased.” She told me that previously she’d noticed the goat seemed more “sedentary” this winter, that it moved and traversed around less.

The day she saw the goat motionless, it was near the bottom of the shale, on its side with all four legs out in front of it, lying “quite peacefully.”  

Todd Chapman of Spring Valley told me, “I loved the goat. Even my family many states away were invested in the goat. ‘Did you see the goat today?’ ‘How’s the goat?’ I don’t have the heart to tell them he’s gone.”

Phoning the Colorado River Valley Field Office office of the BLM, I spoke to Kristy Wallner, range specialist.

“Yes,” she said, with a chuckle, “we all knew about it and the [Colorado] Parks and Wildlife people would let us know, too.” Wallner, who works in Silt, remembers hearing about the goat in 2020, and recalls that a former staffer, now retired, had seen it.

As to how the goat came to be on the bluffs, Wallner could only say, “There’s guesses.

“People like to blame us, that it came from the Sutey Ranch” — a BLM-owned property north of Carbondale — “but it would have had to go over the mountain and on the trail, so it would have been quite the journey. 

“Or…82 is right there and maybe someone dumped it. Or it escaped from the goat grazers or a property. There’s a lot of people with goats around.”

Told that the goat appears to be no more, she said, “It was there a long time.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct Todd Chapman’s first name.