The Pintlers… these were dark, humorless mountains with the temperament of a Scottish highlander, prideful and dour.  Forests clung tenaciously to the crumbled mountainsides.  Their needles gave off a hint of gray, rather than a vibrant green, as if they had absorbed the muted colors of the land itself.  No fancy, hifalutin’ geysers or wind-sculpted pinnacles will ye find here, no sir.  Just good, formidable mountains, tucked away in the underpopulated reaches of southwest Montana.

This morning I had gone seeking a high-elevation plateau in the Pintlers called Goat Flat – an oasis of flat, dry, treeless land amid a wilderness full of forests, cliffs and marshland.  The trail here was so infrequently traveled that even the fragile tundra failed to show evidence of human footsteps.  Instead, sporadic posts sticking out of rock piles marked the Continental Divide Trail. 

It was a land of curious features.  There were mysterious patches within the meadow where frost and thaw cycles had created even, furrowed lines of pushed-up pebbles.  One could almost picture a host of mountain elves, tilling the earth to harvest a crop of wildflowers.  Today the parrots-beak flowers were in full bloom, their small, white towers dusting the tundra and filling the air with the fresh scent of delayed springtime energy.