Hunters are finding early success in the first year of a new mountain goat hunting season that was created on the west side of the Teton Range to relieve competition between the non-native goats and a struggling native bighorn sheep herd there. The rifle season opened August 15, but hunters could purchase an additional archery license and get an earlier start on August 1. To date, a total of 15 mountain goats have been taken, five in the early portion with archery equipment.

The new Hunt Area 4 was created with a new Type A license valid for any mountain goat. Hunt Area 4 was carved out of Hunt Area 2, and consists of lands on the Caribou Targhee National Forest and Bridger Teton National Forest north of Wyoming Highway 22. This hunt area and license type was created to reduce mountain goat numbers in the Teton Range and minimize the expansion of mountain goats into high priority bighorn sheep habitat, in this case the Targhee sheep herd. 

Unlike mountain goat Type 1 and Type 2 licenses, Type A licenses are not once-in-a-lifetime and a hunter could potentially draw a license and harvest a mountain goat every year. In this first season, a total of 48 licenses were issued through a limited quota random draw. Due to the difficult terrain and relatively low number of goats that reside outside Grand Teton National Park, managers expected hunter success to be low. So far, hunters are surpassing those expectations. The season runs through November 15, 2019.