A SLIPPERY SLOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN BIRD
WHEN WILDLIFE BIOLOGIST CARL Brown bailed out of his pickup at 11,000 feet one July day, high in the Beartooth Mountains of northwestern Wyoming, I hardly recognized him. He wore a helmet and carried an ice ax strapped to his backpack. Crampons, cams, hexes, carabineers, ropes tied in Prusik knots, slings, and other climbing gear dangled around his narrow torso. As he walked toward me, he rattled. I had to look hard to find his binoculars.
Tall and well tanned, Brown was first introduced to me by a coworker as “130 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal.” I can vouch for his cable-like strength and endurance. We walked to a sea of sharp-edged boulders the size of pianos above a huge drop-off. Brown, 31 at the time, led the way across them, floating boulder tip to boulder tip laden with gear, while I scrambled behind on a pair of 63-year-old knees. When I finally caught up to him, he was knotting a rope.
Brown had chosen the site for its high elevation and north-facing cliffs surrounded by tundra and heavy snowpack. We stood there looking down over the edge at a verdant, lake-strewn valley showing not a human blemish, separated from us by a sheer granite verticality of well over 300 feet.
“This,” Brown told me as he peered over the chasm, “looks like a
