Mountain Goats

One more post about my time in Montana–I can’t not write about this. On one of the last days of our visit, we drove along the Beartooth Pass from Montana into Wyoming, on the route that leads to Yellowstone National Park. The mountain road twisted past colossal scree slopes, crisscrossed the still visible paths of the 2005 mudslides that had destroyed sections of it.

We burst above tree line to the windy tundra, where grass too gave way to alpine flowers and the vistas opened to further and still further lines of mountains. Snowfields dotted the land, and one mountain lake fed streams that tumbled downward into another lake below.

My parents-in-law had been told about a group of mountain goats onward up the road. It seemed too fortunate a thing to really happen, to see these beautiful animals, but with our eyes peeled we kept driving, and then in the distance, we saw the white shapes hovering on the tundra meadow. They vanished again as a low hill rose between us, and we pulled the car over, took the camera, and walked toward where they must be.

The greens of tundra foliage were muted, like the colors of moss and lichen, like the green was bottled away in that anemic landscape, the chlorophyl holding back from its most showy form for the cold. Snow-covered nine, ten months out of the year, the plants must be quick-growing, and these had burst into riotous flower, tiny blossoms of pale blue, brilliant periwinkle, vivid yellow, purple fringes along the ground, to do their work of life in their short seasons. The flowers hugged the earth, protecting themselves from wind, and the whole mountain was a sea of these little vibrancies, like a star-field.

And then we crested that small rise, and the goats appeared against a further spread of mountains. White shapes, one of them alone might have seemed a boulder. They all had bowed their heads, were taking brief steps and then eating from the meadow, silently, unconcerned with the appearance of these humans.

There were ten or twelve adults with ragged winter coats trailing behind, long horns curving briefly where they met the skull and then jutting vertically. Among them were four dollish kids, stopping frequently to lie down in the flowers and continuing to eat as they did so. After watching a few minutes, we discerned a few yearlings, with stubby horns, smaller-bodied than the adults. One adult seemed larger than all the others and stood in the front of the group, like a protector. The four of us were silent. We sat down in the grass perhaps sixty feet away. We passed a pair of binoculars back and forth.

My parents-in-law read that evening that the mountain goats are not native to this area. They were introduced to these mountains in 1956 by the state of Montana.

Although we had stopped at a good distance from the goats, as we continued to watch them, they came slowly closer to us, continuing to graze, inching forward. At their closest, they were perhaps twenty-five feet away. A group of photographers with tripods came along behind us, and then another few carfuls of tourists. Compared to a lookout we had seen earlier where tourists were avidly feeding chipmunks and marmots, people seemed respectful of these goats. Perhaps their size, or their stateliness.

We got to watch these goats for twenty-five minutes, long enough to take our pictures, and then to put the cameras down and only observe, perceive what it was they did and a small piece of how they lived there on those wild slopes, making an occasional comment or an exclamation to one another, feeling all the time the blessing of these creatures’ visit. I felt like I had seen some spirit of the place in them.

Two days later, we flew to Wisconsin, where I am writing now. This coming Monday, we’ll get our second Covid-19 vaccine shot. We’ll have immunity soon, which will be a great reassurance.

Best wishes for the week ahead,
Jimmy