Logan Pass has a way of making you forget you're at 6,600 feet until your lungs remind you. The boardwalk out to Hidden Lake Overlook climbs through subalpine meadow and stunted fir before the trees give up entirely, but this stretch — still shaded, still holding a little snowmelt in the low spots — belongs to the bighorn sheep.

Three of them had claimed a patch of hillside just off the trail, tucked into a gap where meadow meets timber. Deer-tongue glacier lilies were scattered through the grass in loose yellow constellations, the kind of bloom that only shows up for a few weeks each summer once the snow finally lets go. The sheep didn't seem to mind sharing the real estate.

What gets you first is the horns — that heavy, deliberate curl, growing not in a single sweep but in overlapping arcs that read almost like tree rings, a record of every season survived. Up close, they look less like ornament and more like architecture, built for the kind of headlong collisions bighorns are famous for during rut. Today, though, there was none of that. Just three animals lying in the grass, legs folded beneath them, chewing cud with the unhurried patience of creatures who know exactly how safe this hillside is.

They'd bedded down facing slightly different directions — a small, practical arrangement that meant between the three of them, not much of the surrounding slope went unwatched. One held eye contact for a long moment, dark eyes steady, unbothered, before returning to whatever quiet business sheep attend to on a July afternoon. Behind them, a dense wall of subalpine fir stood almost black in the shade, spared branches and dead snags mixed in among the living trees — the kind of half-wild timber edge that exists right at the border between forest and open alpine country.

Farther along, a lone ram had staked out his own patch of ground on an open, rocky slope, well clear of the trees. No herd around him, no need for one — full curl horns like his don't come without a few seasons of holding your own ground. He lay in the grass with the kind of stillness that reads as confidence rather than caution, glacier lilies scattered around him like the meadow had been decorated for the occasion.