Part of the blessing of youth is the expectation that the best is yet ahead of you and the assumption that life will be better in the future. Middle age tempers that optimism with a realistic understanding that progress can carry a hefty price tag and some of the experiences you treasure will no longer be accessible in the future.
Jeff and I parked our keisters on a rocky outcropping and spent several hours glassing for bears and other game. It didn't take long for us to find the first wild mountain goats that he had ever seen. Even though the goats were over a mile away, we were mesmerized by their skillful and almost reckless navigation of cliffs, boulders, and snowfields. Two of the little white dots in this picture are mountain goats. I'm not offended if you don't believe me. I know what we saw.
Glassing the valley over the next couple of hours yielded sightings of white-tail deer, three more goats and a couple of black bears. Travis was another mile and a half up drainage and he glassed up a nice boar grizzly in the cliffs at the head of the valley and a cow moose in the meadow below our vantage point.
Upon seeing the first of the two bears we were immediately excited and started trying to plan our stalk. Before we left our vantage point, I took a long hard look at the bear's size, comparing his width with tree trunks and stumps. We could tell it wasn't a big bear but Jeff was not going to be picky for his first bear. We had almost made up our minds to go and try a stalk, when I picked out another black bear feeding in the avalanche slide about 100 yds above the first bear. It was significantly bigger than the first bear and I made the assessment that it was probably a sow and a cub. Another hour of watching and glassing them as they fed in and out of sight showed that they had no interaction with each other. That had me second guessing the sow and cub identification to thinking maybe it was a boar shadowing a sow. It would have been early in the breeding season, but not too early to be an unrealistic scenario. I never was comfortable with that assessment either and in the end we settled on the conclusion that it probably was a sow with a yearling that it was trying to kick out. At any rate, the smaller bear was gifted with the monicker "Steven Coalbear" by Jeff and we never made a stalk.
As Jeff and I soaked up the warm sunshine and glassed the surrounding hillsides, we swapped tales of life experiences and adventure we have enjoyed. Jeff's work at a former job took him to many different parts of the world, to cities of renown and distinction, while rubbing shoulders with "A" listers and celebrities that many people would be thrilled to get autographs from. Our stories that afternoon were punctuated by the excitement of sighting another animal and expressions of amazement at the grandeur of the scenery we were experiencing. I could tell the mountain was working its magic on Jeff and about half-way through our sit, he gave this conclusion. He told me, "You know, I've been all around the world and right now, I think this is my new, most favorite place in the world." I could see what would provoke such sentiment and I almost didn't have the heart to break the news to him.
Sadly, that game rich hillside that we were enjoying so much on a beautiful spring afternoon, is cursed to contain one of the richest copper and silver ore deposits in the western US. Progress demands to be satiated and the political bent on both sides of the aisle, support for the mine in the local community strengthened by the bonds of law, bring near certainty that the area will be developed within the next three to five years. Proponents point to the well-paying jobs delivered to the local community and the environmental safeguards planned to avoid disaster. Sure the mountain will always be there... but development of the mine means cutting in a two lane paved road into the next canyon downstream from where we were sitting with 24 hr. heavy duty dump truck traffic as they haul the ore from the shaft to the crusher.
The cost of consumption never seems high when it's someone else's favorite spot on earth that is dramatically altered for a lifetime. I had always thought myself fairly pragmatic about the need for progress and increased development to sustain a first-world standard of living, but this cuts deeply. Emotionally, intrinsically, sacrificing this mountain for bling and industrial metal, feels like throwing away grain and baking chaff to fill our children's bellies.
Or he may have been trying to communicate that if there are any ladies looking for a lean, mean, bear killing machine, here he was, live in Montana.
photo credit-Jeff Quigley 
