Mountain Goats and Human Persistence 

I recently watched a short documentary on the ibex — wild mountain goats that scale near-vertical dam walls to lick salt from the rocks — and it honestly stopped me in my tracks.

They climb not for sport or spectacle, but because their bodies need the minerals to survive. Without them, their bones won’t form properly, their muscles can’t move, and their nerves can’t fire. So they climb, sometimes with their kids right behind them, inching upward on hooves that seem too small for the task.

It got me thinking — aren’t we all climbing something?

We might not be after salt, but we’re chasing other essentials: love, meaning, safety, understanding. Things we can’t live without, even if we rarely admit it. And often, like the ibex, the climb doesn’t make sense to outsiders. It looks too steep, too strange. But we know what we need, and something inside us just keeps going.

There’s something deeply human about the quiet persistence of that climb. The way we push forward in search of connection, in the hope that things will feel lighter on the other side. Sometimes we’re following someone we love. Sometimes we’re leading and don’t even know it.

And maybe the most powerful thing is that, to the ibex, that vertical wall isn’t strange at all. It’s life. Normal. Necessary. Maybe our own walls — the ones we scale in silence every day — aren’t so strange either.

Maybe the climb is how we remember we’re alive.