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.
Goat Flat was not entirely treeless, although it was hard to see how the undersized alpine larch qualified as an actual tree.  Walking in their vicinity gave one the illusion of a giant’s perspective, which, I suppose, fit with the fairyland ambiance of the alpine plateau.  Commonly known as tamarack, the stunted trees looked rough and scraggly from a distance, but when in their midst, the supple branches would swish past with the gentlest of touches.  The needles were surprisingly soft, perhaps because tamaracks are one of the few evergreens that shed their needles in the fall and grow them back every spring.  I found myself looking for navigational excuses to walk through tamarack thickets, just to experience the unexpectedly peaceful sensation of twigs gliding across exposed skin.
At the upper edge of the tundra, a line of white butterflies flitted above the patch of wildflowers where I was resting.  There were a dozen at least, flying in inexplicable formation, playing a fast-paced game of Follow The Leader that puzzled me immensely.  I had never seen butterflies behaving like an over-caffeinated flock of geese, so I studied their maneuvers until the wind picked up and the curious specimens took their game to a more sheltered location.
My explorations took me from the even ground of Goat Flat to a narrow ridgetop, where I became aware of a weird ecological effect.  The ridge seemed to be the dividing line between pink and black rock, except the black color on the north side was actually a coating of lichen, flecked with bits of green lichen for ornamentation.  The shade on the northern slopes must keep these lichens from drying out.  Scrape all these rocks clean, and you’d get a mountain range with a much sunnier complexion.  But it would no longer seem quite so grimly Scottish.
After climbing 10,149-foot Queener Mountain, I looked down the eastern slopes and assessed a potential shortcut back to the trailhead.  Below, there was a thousand feet of broken scree, stacked at a vicious angle.  It is possible to slide down a section of scree as if it was a snowfield, as long as the rocks are small enough and roll predictably.  But if the scree is too chunky, then the descent gets a lot more interesting.
These rocks were certainly big enough to cause trouble.  I moved diagonally down and across the steep slope, keeping one step ahead of the rockslides triggered by my passage.  In these situations, solo hiking is much more preferable.  No one wants to be the guy who buried his friend in a landslide.  In my wake, rocks crashed together with a sound that was a gruffer version of breaking glass.  No time to turn around and look, however… not until I found terrain that was slightly more stable.
When approaching larger boulders, I always had to make a quick judgment: will this one support my weight?  Or will it come loose and take me down the mountain with it, like a surfboard in a sea of scree, accelerating until it suddenly collides with a larger object?  I’ve had practice in screefields, and usually I choose correctly.  Usually.
Just as my thoughts on the subject were coalescing into literary form, I stepped down onto a long stone slab but missed the upper edge, and the unexpected lack of traction caused me to slip on the coating of black lichen.  My upper body fell back, and I threw out my left palm to catch myself.  Several layers of skin ripped off the heel of my hand in short order, but my head and spine were saved from injury.
Blood dripped down from the divots in my hand for the next quarter mile until I found a stream where I could rinse and bandage my palm.  It could have been worse.  I bore my wound like a true Scotsman.  After all, as they say up in the highlands, what’s pleasure without a little hardship to go along with it?

Bryan is a 1991 Norwich High School graduate and works as a naturalist at the Rancho Alegre Outdoor School in Santa Barbara, CA. You may reach him mid-journey at foolsby@hotmail.com. Look for Bryan’s columns on our Facebook page – www.facebook.com/theeveningsun.