We parked one vehicle at the Yamnuska parking lot, and then drove to the other end of the Goat range, just across the street from the Graymont plant (map says Continental Lime) in the obvious parking spot just off the road.

The best route is to get onto the ridge immediately, and stay as high as you can all the way up. If it's raining this advice might be bad, as staying high means walking up some slab which could be slippery when wet.

Before long, you'll end up at the top of Doorjamb. From here you can see Loder, and in behind it part of the ridge leading to Goat Peak. Most of what you see is the climbers' route, which isn't the same as the scramblers' route for a good part of the trip.

Continue on to Loder, walking up more slab (this slab might be unavoidable; we didn't try to avoid it!). Once you're at the top of Loder you get a good view of part of the ridge you need to walk over to get to Goat Peak. What you can see of the ridge looks interesting, but keep in mind that you don't need to go over much that you can see.

Continue along the ridge on the decent trail (it isn't very big, but is pretty obvious). When you finally get to something that looks impassable without climbing gear, you deke around to the right of the ridge and go in behind the tricky spots. The trail gets a bit thinner here. Follow it until you come around a corner and are presented with a view of the whole bowl. It looks spectacularly difficult to pick a route through this part, but rest assured there is actually a thin trail that leads you safely across.

Continue along the small trail until it slopes downward toward a gully and then disappears. Back up a few meters, then clamber up TWO rock bands. As you are climbing up, to your right a hundred meters or so to the right, you should be able to see what looks like a very narrow trail paralleling the flattish spot you're about to climb up to. I build a small, fragile cairn on the trail where you need to stop climbing up. I very much doubt it survived the high winds, but a couple of the lower rocks might still be there, who knows. I am a bad cairn-builder!

Once you are on the trail, contour around the bowl. The trail doesn't gain or lose much elevation, and is actually far less terrifying than it looked from a distance. Follow it to the base of the right-most knob of rock visible from the other side (see pic below). Step in front of the rock knob and walk along the exposed platform for about 30 more meters, and then you're back on the ridge. Hold onto your hat -- the wind might try to take it away from you!

From here it's a quick jaunt to the dangerously-steep looking slab that leads you to the summit. Even fairly close, the slab looks too steep to be safe to climb up, but once you're on it you'll find that it's not bad at all. It leads you straight to the summit.

Heading down the other side of the summit is more interesting than anything on the Loder side. There is quite a bit of fun route-finding, unless you want to just climb straight down, which is probably not as difficult as it looked to us. We found easy way around most everything, until we came to a steep, broad section of downsloping slab. This area is bolted, so we rappelled off it, and down to the ridge 30m below. We brought a full-length (60m) rope, and used almost all of it for the rappel.

Continue along the ridge, which gets progressively thinner, looser, and scarier. There may be escape routes at various points. We didn't check any of them out, as they all looked loose and crappy (looser and crappier than the stuff on the ridge-top!). After lots of downclimbing, we reached the scree slope that joins the last high-point visible from the highway. I believe the Goat Slabs may be beneath this point. We didn't want to climb all the way up this peak only to find that it was a tricky downclimb on the other side. Visible from the previous high-spot was a fork in the trail over the scree. zthe high road leads to a gully that leads up to the top. The lower fork led to what appeared to be a ledge system that we thought would cut across the front of this last peak and onto the ridge beyond, which was our exit route.

It wasn't as easy as it looked, but if you choose your route carefully, dropping down into the gully on the other side, then climbing up and to the left to a point about 5m above where you start the up-climb, you'll be well positioned to drop down onto the ridge on the other side. Be careful!

On the final ridge, both Mark and I thought there was supposed to be a bolted rappel station. We looked and looked and found nothing. Mark decided that downclimbing immediately to the right of the crest of rock, onto a steep slab section that had some decent-looking hand holds on the right (and a nice corner to wedge your right foot into all the way down) was the best route. I certainly didn't think it was a "good" route, but it was the best one that we could see, so down we went. A little below the slab, Mark and I parted company to avoid a shooting-gallery scenario. Mark picked his way down skiers-left, while I went down to the skiers-right. Both routes worked okay. My route found me at the top of a small gully which looked easy to climb down followed by a short scree slope. Beyond that I couldn't see, but Mark called over to suggest that I traverse across to where he was, as he could see a clear route all the way to the bottom, whereas I couldn't see much further than 10m in front of me. I zipped across, and we were both off the hard bit!