Surveying the Valley

We spotted them from the road up near the ski lift — there’s a summer ski area on the Beartooth, which is its own odd thing to drive past. Five or six goats working the rocks: this one, an older male carrying considerably more horn (as evidenced in Patriarch), and four females.

I got out and moved along the boulders until I was lateral to them instead of underneath, about thirty-five yards off, and then we just stayed. An hour of watching them pick their way around and feed, with very little interest shown in us either way.

This is the younger male. You can read it in the horns and in how much less bulk he’s carrying than the old one.

None of them are supposed to be here, strictly speaking. Mountain goats aren’t native to the Greater Yellowstone — the paleontological, archaeological and historical records turn up no evidence of them in this ecosystem at all. The animals on the Beartooth descend from goats transplanted into the Absaroka and Madison ranges in the 1940s and 50s. They didn’t establish inside Yellowstone itself until the 1990s, and they’ve been spreading through the high country ever since.

The square crop is deliberate. Everything outside it is scree and blur, and cutting the rest of the mountain away leaves the two of us looking at each other. I wanted it to sit like a portrait, because that’s what it is. At some point he stopped working the rock, turned, and looked straight into the lens.