A mountain goat in Glacier National Park, Montana

© Sumio Harada/Minden Pictures

A mountain goat in Glacier National Park, Montana

The mountain goat is the official symbol of Montana’s Glacier National Park, which was established on this day in 1910. Uniquely suited to climbing steep, rocky slopes with their specially adapted traction devices (aka cloven hooves), mountain goats spend much of the year scaling the peaks in Glacier’s high country where they graze. But in the spring, they occasionally head down to the park’s alpine meadows, where longer days and warmer temperatures coax wildflowers into splashing their colors onto the green hills. Seeing the flowers may make you as contented as this mountain goat appears to be.