Picture of the Day - Goat's Head

Yesterday, I showed you an image of St. Mary's Lake at Sunrise, taken last Sunday morning in Glacier National Park. This image was taken shortly afterwards, on the way back to Whitefish.

Now, you may notice that this picture is slightly blurred. Well there is a good reason for this and here is how it came about (the story is much better than the picture).

First, you have to understand how the "Going to the Sun" highway is laid out. The highway is cut into the side of the mountain, an engineering marvel, to say the least. Sometimes, it is 100% vertical on both sides of the road...a little scary if you think about it while driving. It is so steep in places that even sure-footed animals like mountain goats cannot go up or down if they are on the road.

Now, over the course of my life I have only seen a few mountain goats in the wild, mostly at a great distance. As we were driving back to Whitefish, we came across two mountain goats on a portion of the highway where there was no place to go up or down. So they just ran along the left side of the road. One stopped while the other (this one) kept going. We tried not to scare him, but he just kept trotting along. We carefully pulled up even with him and Dave rolled down his window so I could take this shot. This goat was perhaps 6-7 feet from me when I took the picture. It is a little blurry because both the goat and the car were moving at the time.

What makes this story even better was that it wasn't the only such incident for us that day. On the way to St. Mary's lake, we came across an adult female deer running along the highway. We stayed behind her until she came to safe place in the road where she could get off. There, waiting for her, was her mate, a male deer with a full set of antlers. We drove on, not taking any pictures because both our cameras were in the back of the car.

Then, a few miles later, we came across two bighorn male sheep with a fully developed set of horns, also stuck on the highway. We stayed behind them until they found a safe place to head down the mountain. All I could think of was that their horns exactly matched the St. Louis Rams football helmets.

It was an amazing morning seeing all these animals so up close and personal...and all in one morning. I only wish the cameras were not in the back of the car for the first two encounters.