Ninety-nine percent of the comments were positive (“This is wild!” “Hysterical!”), but everyone knows there are always a few who feel it their duty in life to rain on other people’s Subarus—er, parades.
After the incident of mountain goats dancing on top of the crossover SUV was captured on video in early July, over a million viewers oohed and ahhed online, though some stung the photographer: Why didn’t he stop the goats dancing on someone else’s car!
He had to set the record straight.
Mountain goats were not on Michael Ryno’s itinerary when he set out just before 4 a.m. on the 1.5-hour drive to Mount Evans and arrived a half hour before sunrise. His goal was to photograph the 1,000-year-old pine trees with all the colors of the sunrise streaming through their twisted boughs, and Mr. Ryno, 62, president of Professional Photographers of Colorado, captured that magic without a hitch.
The mountain goats were an afterthought. But they delivered something unexpected for the photographer: Exposure and notoriety.
Driving toward the summit of the 14,000-foot Mount Evans, nearing the top he stopped and saw a Subaru with the license plate “GLAMP” (glamourous camping) parked on a craggy pullout, not designated for parking, on the side of the road from which it appeared some hikers had probably set out.
More importantly, though, he saw goats.
“When I got there, there were two baby goats that were right in front of the car, between me and the car,” he told The Epoch Times, guessing that they were probably just months old. The two baby goats were with two adult goats, he added, and they were “kind of walking around the car, which is fairly common up there.”
He neither recognized the car nor knew its owner, he told the newspaper. As he saw the goats get up on the Subaru, he grabbed his phone to capture them testing and playing on the bouncing surfaces that are very unlike the unforgiving rocks they are accustomed to. “Clearly they’re used to walking on hard surfaces,” Mr. Ryno said. “They’re used to walking on rocks.”
There was a black Yakima storage container on the roof of the SUV, and the nimble-hoofed mountain goats seemed immune to slippage as they leapt atop its plastic surface with ease to do a “little dance on top,” the photographer said.
“I thought, I'll put that video out as a reel on Instagram,” he said, “not expecting the attention that it’s been getting.”
Like other mountain goat clips, this one went viral. After it was posted, it claimed 2.2 million views, 90,000 likes, and over 2,000 comments. Mr. Ryno, a former corporate banker who has settled into photography as a sort of retirement dream job, has recently been on local news channels and even went on live television to talk about the goat incident that day.
But all the attention also brought critics out from the woodwork.
“Only a few people,” he said, “who have questioned why I didn’t chase them off of the car.”
He insists he has his reasons.
“Typically, with wildlife you don’t interfere and chase. Whether it’s bears or whether it’s mountain goats or whatever, you don’t try and antagonize the adults,” he said. “Generally speaking, unless somebody’s getting hurt or something like that, typically the idea is you don’t try and disrupt what they’re naturally doing.”
Mr. Ryno says he has reached out to other professional wildlife photographers, and they told him he did “absolutely the right thing.”
“If it was my car, I would have probably done the same thing under that circumstance, [given that there were] the other baby goats that were at the base when this all started,” he said.
Mr. Ryno was even able to connect with the owner of the car: Mindy Williford, an ambitious outdoorswoman with 300 extreme hikes under her belt (“Her camping is not glamorous,” Mr. Ryno says). Somebody recognized her plate from the video and through Instagram informed her that footage of the dance existed. Though she had only witnessed the aftermath, she captured video of her own showing hoofprints on her car and the excitement it caused her and her friend and then posted it on Instagram.
After they connected and she received an email from Mr. Ryno, she finally got the full picture.
There was no damage, according to the photographer. The abundant hoof prints all washed off with ease for Ms. Williford without leaving any indentations.
Was she upset?
“Not at all,” Mr. Ryno said. “Her comment was, ‘Oh, I wish I could have seen this.’”
