Just try to follow Scott Dersam as he talks breathlessly, at hyperspeed, about his prehistoric discoveries after a couple beers at 9,500 feet in the Beartooth Mountains. It’s hard to keep up. “This sediment shouldn’t occur for us here,” Dersam says, thigh deep in an excavated pit as the setting sun bleeds orange on the horizon. “I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but in standard paleoecology in the surrounding ecosystem, all the glaciology experts, this is just not something that should exist given the ecosystem we believe we had I wasn’t even trained for surveying for [artifacts as old as we’re finding] in these ecosystems because they wouldn’t have existed.”  He says this even faster than the lack of punctuation here suggests. We’re at Dersam’s camp on his annual expedition into the high country a few miles outside the border of Yellowstone National Park, and he’s on a tear. “Sometimes when he talks, I record,” Zack Kenworth, a master’s student at the University of Montana, says from his camp chair. What Dersam means is this: We’re visiting one of several sites he’s unearthed that could shake up our understanding of both the human and geologic history of the whole region. Testing reveals the dirt he’s telling me about was exposed to sun at a time when the entire area should have been covered in a massive glacier. And he says along with that ancient soil, he’s found the highest- and potentially oldest-known human habitation sites anywhere in North America; maybe the Western Hemisphere. His findings suggest that humans lived here at least 13,000 years ago in a high-alpine ecosystem that prevailing knowledge says people couldn’t have accessed at all.  “We could have the oldest Clovis sites in North America here and it happens to be in a place that shouldn’t exist in an ecosystem that shouldn’t exist,” he says. “It’s more than a monkey wrench to the current paradigm. It’s a full kick to the chest.”  Dersam is 39, lean and bearded. As he continues on his excited, speedy ramble about how little we know about alpine prehistory, my eyes are on jagged chunks of exposed grey bedrock and alpine wildflowers. He points out chunks of chert and obsidian shaped by humans hundreds or even thousands of years ago I’ve just stepped over.   As a kid on his uncle’s property in Texas, Dersam came across his first projectile point. “It totally ruined me,” he says. Ever since, he’s spent the vast majority of his time on trails with his eyes glued to the ground, looking for artifacts rather than taking in his surroundings. He jokes he should write a book called The Peaks I’ve Been Near.  Dersam is finding evidence in the Beartooths that could upend our understanding of the human and geological history of the region. Credit: Nick Mott In a past life, Dersam ran a sandwich and bread shop in Bozeman but grew sick of the kitchen and craved a new step. He cut his dreadlocks and went back to school late in life to pursue his passion: archaeology. He earned his Ph.D. in 2022 and maintains an adjunct teaching position at Montana State University. But he and his wife, Sari, pursued a nontraditional approach to the discipline. Primarily, the Dersams run a nonprofit called the Alpine Ecosystems Research Institute, or AERI. They bankroll their work mostly through institutional support and donations, along with a few small grants. They survey for landowners, lead credited field experiences for students, take volunteers out on the landscape, and dive into groundbreaking research on public and private land alike — like the trip I’m on in the Beartooths.  “It’s like getting struck by lightning and winning the lottery twice in the same day. We will go our entire lives and never find something like this again, ever.” Scott Dersam, archaeologist At its heart, AERI studies why we use mountains in the first place. These high-elevation ecosystems are, in many ways, a relatively blank spot on the archaeological map. For the most part, archaeological knowledge develops where we live and build, which is predominantly in the swathes of private land at lower elevations — not public land up high. “We know about archaeology because of bridges and roads and things getting developed on federal money,” Dersam says.  Regulations like Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act mandate that the government consider the cultural and historical impacts of federal projects. But we don’t develop much in the mountains. So, primarily, a handful of passionate archaeologists have pioneered alpine research, uncovering the materials left behind by ancient peoples on ice patches, permafrost-laden soil and remote alpine plateaus. “It’s an implicit bias,” Dersam says of the paradigm that’s seized the archaeological world for decades. “We’re not up here. Why the hell would they be up here all the time?“ A recovering rock climber, Dersam holds a long love affair with high places, and with the Beartooths in particular. But the range had something else unique going for it that piqued his interest. Vern Waples, a former game warden who passed away in 2006, collected more than 2,000 artifacts from the Beartooth and Pryor mountains as he rode around on horseback from the 1950s to the 1970s. After his death, Waples’s family donated his collection to the Custer Gallatin National Forest. “Only after he gave the totality of his collection did we realize it’s the largest and most dense high-elevation lithic collection anywhere in North America,” Dersam says.  Along with the artifacts themselves, Waples left behind detailed topo maps of his findings. A handful of archaeologists retraced his steps to try to find more, but hardly found anything at all.  “I got interested in this area because of that failure,” Dersam says.  Equipped with scientific models that revealed sites with high likelihood of ancient habitation, Dersam also followed Waples’ decades-old tracks through the mountains. At first, he came up nearly empty-handed. But he modified his models and began having a bit more success. Then, in 2022, a natural calamity changed the game. Archaeology thrives on disturbance. Wind-deposited sediment, seasonal runoff, even road grades churn and move the earth, exposing our history — often in the form of red chert, petrified wood and the glassy black of obsidian. In June 2022, a torrential rain-on-snow event blasted the remaining spring snowpack out of the Beartooths and unleashed destructive floods throughout Greater Yellowstone. In high elevations, the force of the snowmelt roiled and uplifted sediment that had been buried for thousands of years. Dersam returned to the Beartooths in August of that year. Revisiting places he’d investigated before, areas with hundreds of flakes suddenly had thousands. Artifacts were surfacing from the soil where during previous visits he’d found only grass and rock. “Things just absolutely exploded,” Dersam says.  The earliest residents of North America left behind only tiny fragments of culture. Belief systems, cultural understandings of the world, aesthetic values — these are largely lost to time. Instead, the legacy we have comes in the form of stones knapped and hammered into specific shapes. Archaeologists call this “material culture.” From locations and styles of these remnants, scientists can piece together basic elements of how and where these groups persisted. Montana State University undergraduate Kylin Murphy-Garcia and University of Montana master’s student Zack Kenworth study an excavated pit on Dersam’s annual survey. Credit: Nick Mott In the way that Leonardo da Vinci passed down his aesthetic style, ancient ways of knapping rock to sharp points were an artistic endeavor, learned and handed down through generations. “It’s an understanding of the world that’s passed on technologically,” Dersam says.  Glance down at your feet at these Beartooth sites, and you may just see broken rock, on a rare occasion something you might recognize as an “arrowhead.” But trained archaeologists like Dersam can instantly identify the age of a stone tool, the culture it’s associated with, even sometimes where the material came from.  Scientists have long debated who got to the Americas first, when and how they got here. A handful of sites across the continent suggest humans arrived even earlier, but by and large Clovis people were the first group to leave behind a consistent and widespread trace of their existence. They persisted across the continent roughly 13,000 years ago. Even if there were earlier humans on the landscape, Clovis people made a mark like no one before them. While thousands of Clovis artifacts have been found across the country, the overwhelming majority occur at low elevations, Dersam says.  Until now, little evidence exists to indicate they used the mountains; they specialized in killing mammoths and other massive megafauna that — as far as we know — roamed mostly on the plains. Their stone tools are known for being proportionately large in size — though plenty of small Clovis points exist too. The fluted, leaf-shaped tools they shaped millennia ago still litter the landscape.  Today, at least 49 tribes have historic and cultural ties to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Clovis people, genetic testing reveals, are the ancestors of nearly all Indigenous groups in the Americas. In fact, they’re most closely related to current tribes in Central and South America.  “There’s a saying in archaeology. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”Bill Powell, Ph.D. anthropology student, University of Montana For decades, archaeologists had found a handful of Clovis points in the high alpine. But they were largely dismissed as isolated flakes, too sparse to prove much of anything. More recent cultures might have found caches of points and reused them, leading to the occasional rogue artifact in high elevations. For the most part, the theory went that Clovis people stayed down low, chasing big game. But that summer after the flood, Dersam found two clearly identifiable Clovis points and several more objects that were likely associated with that era of humans. A single artifact doesn’t mean habitation. But here, all at once, his findings couldn’t be explained by a one-off. “This is the first time we don’t have just one or two Clovis points. We have full sites,” Dersam says. “Everything but the kitchen sink.” Ever since that post-flood excursion, he’s been finding more. He names some of his findings playfully, after Lord of the Rings characters: Treebeard, Morgoth, Earendil, Galadriel and the Banded Eye of Sauron (or BEOS for short). Now, he’s trying to figure out how and why these people could have been here in the first place.  The morning after I arrive, we break into two groups: One surveys for new sites, the other excavates for soil data adjacent to a site Dersam has already discovered. Dersam tells me I’m on survey. I tag along with some students to see if we can find ancient flakes, points and scrapers scattered atop the soil.  People love to take artifacts home rather than leave them be, so we’re somewhat undercover. Bill Powell, a Ph.D. anthropology student at the University of Montana, tells me if any passing dirtbikers get too chatty, we’ll tell them we’re surveying for drought-tolerant plants. Hopefully, he suggests, it’s just boring enough not to spur further inquiry. As we set out, small pink flags in hand, I realize the work is mostly walking slowly and silently in dense grizzly country, eyes on the earth in front of our feet. We play music, in part to alert nearby wildlife to our presence.  Almost immediately, Powell finds an artifact. It’s a flake — nothing groundbreaking. But I can feel my heart beat faster. “There’s no way that flake doesn’t have friends,” Powell says.  University of Wyoming Ph.D. student Claudia Celia sifts soil excavated from a pit adjacent to a Clovis site in the Beartooths. Credit: Nick Mott Looking for artifacts is a bit like looking for shed antlers or morel mushrooms. At first, the whole affair feels hopeless. But then, your eyes dial in to the shape and color you’re seeking. Suddenly, the ground is alive with possibility. We keep pacing the hummocky hills to see what else is beneath our feet.  Humans have used this area for thousands of years. But the oldest findings are so remarkable because 13,000 years ago — the time of Clovis people — scientists believe the region was covered in an immense cap of ice. The Pinedale Glacier blanketed nearly the entirety of Yellowstone National Park and much of the surrounding ecosystem. It reached its biggest, thickest point about 20,000 years ago. Mammoths and bison antiquus — the much larger ancestor of modern buffalo — roamed the region. But much of Greater Yellowstone was blocked by this thick, enormous layer of ice.  If humans traveled atop that frozen surface, the movement of the glaciers would have pulverized anything they left behind. Fauna wouldn’t have been here since there was no forage. And therefore, people likely wouldn’t have spent substantial time here either.  Or at least that’s what we thought. Dersam has run soil tests finding sediment that saw sun anywhere from 17,000 to 22,000 years ago — right when ice should have been at its deepest. He thinks our understanding of glaciation in the region writ large paints with too broad a stroke. Maybe this particular basin never iced up at all during the Pinedale glaciation; maybe there were narrow corridors in parts of the ice, pathways for prehistoric fauna with ancient people in tow. This is part of the mystery Dersam’s trying to solve with his fieldwork, and why we’re surveying for more sites. Combing the mountains for artifacts is hypnotic for anxious pacers like me. This is a landscape that’s well-loved and often abused by recreationists today. Far more than ancient flakes or points, we find the gleam of sun on old beer cans left behind by careless snowmobilers. Powell and Kylin Murphy-Garcia, a Montana State University undergraduate, have a friendly competition. Murphy-Garcia finds a flake Powell had stepped over.  “Kylin you stole my point!” Powell jokes.  “Sorry, Bill,” Murphy-Garcia jabs back. “Better luck next time.” In the end, after eight miles and as many hours poring over the surface of the earth, we leave having found only a few small fragments of tools. There’s little to report when we get back to camp.  “There’s a saying in archaeology,” Powell says. “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”  He says if we’re coming back empty-handed, it might mean the other group stumbled upon something amazing. There’s a certain magic that way about Dersam’s archaeology in the Beartooths.  We’ll find out when we get back to camp. The archaeological history of Clovis people in Montana reflects a larger tension: Archaeology has long been conducted by mostly White scientists studying cultures they’re not a part of. There’s a legacy of exploitation, extraction and abuse. In the late 1960s, two construction workers near Wilsall, in the shadow of the Crazy Mountains, stumbled on a cache of human remains and nearly 100 artifacts as they excavated a sandstone cliff with their front-end loader. Some of the remains, it turned out, were the carefully and seemingly ceremonially buried skeleton of a 1- to 2-year-old child.  Back then, few laws governed how to handle such a discovery. The site itself was largely destroyed. The artifacts were cleaned, erasing a trove of archaeological data. The small boy was removed from his grave. Testing suggests he was buried about 12,600 years ago. The Clovis Child, or Anzick-1, was one of thousands of Indigenous remains excavated and extracted from its burial by mostly White collectors. But to this day, the finding remains the oldest human burial site ever found in the Americas.  About 45 years later, Crow tribal member Shane Doyle worked with archaeologists to consult with tribes and ceremonially return Anzick-1 to the place he had laid for millennia. Back then, Doyle — now the North American Indigenous Rights Relations Director at The Nature Conservancy — had recently completed his Ph.D. on the excavation of the Absaroka Agency and was teaching Native American Studies at Montana State University. Shane Doyle is a member of the Crow Tribe and scholar who was involved in the reburial of the Clovis Child in 2014, nearly 50 years after the boy’s remains were discovered south of Wilsall, Montana. He told me he was unfamiliar with the Anzick site before he was brought into the fold to rebury the child, but he knew through oral history in his tribe that his people had been here since the ice receded. Learning about the Clovis Child, he says, offered an entirely new level of appreciation for his ancient ancestors. “They left behind a legacy we are in awe of,” Doyle says. “On our best day, could we be as strong as they were?” He told his uncle about what he learned and his uncle texted him: “If you had to send a message 12,000 years into the future, what would it be? And how would you know anyone would even understand it?” Doyle says tribes don’t always see eye-to-eye with university archaeologists or even with one another. And perspectives on how to respectfully deal with archaeological discoveries — and especially human remains — differ even within tribes.  In June 2014, the child was reburied. “The spirit is now back to the other side,” Crow elder Thomas Larson Medicine Horse Sr. said during the ceremony. Today, more than a decade later, Dersam says bitterness between tribal people and archaeologists still exists. The sites he found in the Beartooths are less than 100 miles as the crow flies from the Anzick site. Dersam tries to involve tribes every way he can and conduct his work in a respectful way. He says seven to 10 tribal historic preservation officers and elders attended a U.S. Forest Service meeting earlier this year and voiced support for his work in the Beartooths. “There’s no way that flake doesn’t have friends.”Bill Powell, Ph.D. anthropology student, University of Montana That’s in part due to Dersam’s methodology. He’s not excavating and destroying sites. His findings are often linked to hunting, not burial and ceremony. He conducts what he calls “off-site archaeology,” only removing points that passersby might find and take for their own private collections. Those points provide valuable data as well: He tests them to find out if these 13,000-year-old hunks of rock passed through an elk, a mammoth or a bison. He leaves the vast majority of his findings in place, taking detailed notes, photos and coordinates. The goal is to disturb the land as little as possible.  “We do our very best not to even touch anything so it can remain in its preserved state in that cultural landscape,” Dersam says.  The artifacts themselves are almost a footnote to his work. He uses complicated models that predict soil depth and excavates only on the periphery of sites. He analyzes pollen content in the earth to reconstruct millennia-old plant communities. He even tests for when deep soil last saw sunlight. Taken as a whole, his works aims to reconstruct both the human and ecological history of the area.  “We’re after dirt more than anything,” he told me on my first night, gesturing to his 30-pound backpack full of soil. “But if we get something cool, it’s kind of like the holy grail.”  Dean Nicolai, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and professor in the Native American Studies division at Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Montana, subscribes to a similar philosophy. Nicolai has a deep background in archaeology, but his tribe holds a distinct view toward artifacts scattered atop the soil. “Things are animate, they’re alive,” he says. “So if we start to remove those things that context can be disturbed. And that’s a spiritual context.”  Dersam holds a Clovis point discovered in the Beartooth Mountains this summer. Credit: Nick Mott The way an archaeologist interprets the land around them is embedded into the way they conduct their work, he says. “If I see the world as animate or alive, then I’m going to treat it as such. I’m not going to collect something that doesn’t need to be collected.”  Nicolai finds himself in a sometimes fraught middle ground between tribal perspectives and traditional archaeology. “We don’t need somebody else to tell us about who we are, where we’ve been,” he says. “Our oral tradition tells us already what we know about ourselves. But then there’s this other curiosity that I have. I actually want to see it for myself too. I want to understand who these people were, what they were up to, where they were at, what they were hunting. All that is so fascinating to me.”  Dersam’s findings in the Beartooths, he says, are intriguing and exciting. To avoid surveying altogether, Dersam says, risks losing sight of the importance of these places. In other words, when we’re not looking, we’re forgetting. But he says a central goal of his organization is to convey that archaeological artifacts are nonrenewable resources. “If everyone is picking up every flake they come across, eventually the true signatures of these peoples and their past on this landscape will be lost,” he says. “It’s easy to erase a people.”  Doyle, Nicolai and Dersam agree that the relationship between Indigenous groups and the discipline of archaeology has shifted radically in recent years, for the better.  “Tribes now are seeing that working hand-in-hand with archaeologists empowers them,” Doyle says. “It provides the context, the scientific evidence and the background to protect landscapes far greater than oral traditions can do on their own.” Dersam has a knack for finding the oldest and rarest.  A few months before my trip to the Beartooths, I tagged along with Dersam on a different survey conducted on a mixture of public and private land north of Yellowstone. Almost immediately after I arrived, as we walked and talked along a mid-elevation ridge, he bent down and picked up a Folsom point. Folsom people date just a smidge more recent than Clovis.  “An archaeologist can go a whole career and never find something like this in a place like this,” Ph.D. student Bill Powell said that day. His hands stayed on his head for the next 20 minutes, processing the find. It was the second Folsom point Dersam had discovered that day. University of Montana master’s student Zack Kenworth collects soil samples from an excavated pit on Dersam’s annual survey. Credit: Nick Mott In the Beartooths, Powell, Murphy-Garcia and I drive over the rutted and rugged road back to camp after our long day surveying. Dersam is standing by our mess tent with a couple other students. They’re buzzing. We can feel the energy as we approach.  Dersam pulls out his phone to show us a video from earlier that day. We crowd around the small screen.  In the video, he’s brushing away soil in a small pit. He’d uncovered part of what appeared to be an ancient hearth — dark carbon in the soil that didn’t fit a forest fire. A piece of stone pokes through. French composer FKJ is playing piano through a speaker out of frame. Dersam switches from a brush to a tool that looks like something you’d find at a dentist’s office. There’s giggling off-screen. “My nerves can’t handle this shit right now,” Dersam says in the video. “Oh God,” Colin King, a master’s student at the University of Wyoming, replies. “Oh my God.” “Yep, that’s a Clovis base,” Dersam says. “In the middle of the goddamn hearth.”  Perched over the pit, Claudia Celia, a UW Ph.D. student, gasps and laughs in disbelief.  The meaning here is hard for non-archaeologists to grasp. Dersam puts it like this: About 13,000 years ago — soil and carbon testing will reveal exactly when —an ancient hunter likely finished a hunt. Whether successful or unsuccessful, the piece of rock they used was done for. So they tossed it on the fire. In the millennia that followed, weather deposited more soil atop the ancient, broken stone. As climate shifted in the millennia since, as seasons of snow and rain and wind reshaped the landscape above, this prehistoric tool likely never moved. The context of the site was never disturbed. It remained buried deep beneath the surface of the earth. Dersam brushes dirt from a 13,000-year-old Clovis point base unearthed from an ancient hearth high in the Beartooth Mountains, summer 2026. Credit: Colin King “We had to take a damn breather,” Celia says at camp. They’d been looking for dirt in the pit, not artifacts. After the finding, the three sat down for about an hour, shaking from the adrenaline.  “There’s never been anything found like this,” Dersam says. All the other Clovis points found in high elevations were scattered on the surface of the earth. “It’s like getting struck by lightning and winning the lottery twice in the same day. We will go our entire lives and never find something like this again, ever.”  “Haven’t you already said that about these sites?” I ask him.  “Oh, several times,” he says. “But this is above that. We have been researching this site for four years to try to find anything even of close potential to this. To have this intact component here, it will alter the past 60 years of high-elevation research in North America. Turn it right on its ass is what it’s going to do.” Dersam acknowledges all this depends on testing when he gets back home. Archaeologists are notoriously good at talking with each other and bad at talking with the public. But already he’s scheming about a big upcoming conference: “My poster for Paleoamerican Odyssey is gonna be lit,” he says. “This is generations of people coming back and using this landscape. It’s insane. It should not exist and that’s why it’s so much fun.” Suddenly, our work has an urgency and a focus. “We found a subsurface Clovis point,” Dersam says. “We’re busy now.”  The Anzick site is still the only noncontroversial Clovis site discovered in Montana. Over the last four years, Dersam has found six more Clovis sites at high elevations, five of them in the Beartooths. That alone, he maintains, could demonstrate just how much some of the continent’s earliest peoples utilized the high mountains. And this piece of fractured rock, he says, “It’s the smoking gun.”  Craig Lee, a preeminent high-alpine archaeologist at Montana State University — and a former mentor of Dersam’s — had high praise for his protege’s work. Collectively, Lee says, there are few people that have spent the time Dersam has looking for Clovis artifacts in high-alpine environments: “He’s in the best of senses what you could call a good ‘dirt’ archaeologist,” getting his hands dirty, pushing our understanding of Paleoamerican culture further into new ground. “These aren’t trivial undertakings,” Lee says.   Dersam makes sure to dot his t’s and cross his i’s. Before the work is done, the two small pits that were dug will be filled. There will be little evidence we were ever here.  The vibe at camp when work is over is a combination of light debauchery and nerdery.  Students go on nighttime walks, Coors in hand, to scour potential sites. They crawl on hands and knees by headlamp to look for more artifacts and marvel at their findings. They leave them where they find them. One night, everyone slides down an ice patch using trash bags as sleds to celebrate a volunteer’s birthday. But mostly folks talk about courses, fieldwork, professors and archaeological theories. The volunteers are mostly university students, after all. The latest night ends around 10 p.m.  Clovis people were mammoth specialists. Some artifacts are proportionately large in size, but others are curiously small. Here, Dersam displays a Clovis point from a donated cache in his Livingston, Montana office. Credit: Scott Dersam As we sit in a circle, eating freeze-dried meals under the setting summer sun, Dersam often enters his lightning-speed diatribe-mode to make meaning of what we’re finding. “Mountain use in general has always been a response to climatological pressures,” he says one night. He explains that several thousand years after Clovis culture faded away, a warming period in the early Holocene pushed temperatures as much as 5 degrees hotter than they are today, leading to severe and widespread drought in the region. Bison populations crashed. During this time, humans, the archaeological record suggests, left the plains and headed for the cooler, wetter, higher elevations.  The mountains called, and the continent’s early humans listened.  “Mountains have always been a source of not just refugia but security for humans because we have the ability to survive up here,” he says. “It’s an area of resource density.”  In Clovis times, Dersam theorizes that the melting glaciers and surrounding permafrost could have provided the opportunity to store meat. Megafauna like mammoths might have meandered up high — following the “green wave” of flora as spring and summer took hold, much like Yellowstone-area bison do today. People were likely in pursuit. Montana State University Kylin Murphy-Garcia examines one of the findings in the Beartooths. Credit: Nick Mott “Humans have been one of the main keystone species in any ecosystem in North America for more than 13,000 years,” he says. “These ecosystems have always been part of our behavior. We’ve been here for a very long time and have been an active aspect of keeping and maintaining the health of these ecosystems.” Going to the mountains, Dersam says, feels like coming home. Because they always have been a home. He takes issue with the idea of wilderness as the law conceives it: a landscape “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”  “We’ve always loved that idea of exploratory, off-the-map, terra incognita, the unknown landscape,” Dersam says. “It’s all bullshit.” Doyle and Nicolai echoed that sentiment: people have been everywhere, always, tending to and caring for the landscape. History repeats itself, Dersam says. As temperatures warm, alpine ecosystems will be in higher demand, he speculates. We talk about the Crazy Mountains, the Beartooth Front. Already, the wealthy are snatching high-elevation land, securing their own, personal safe havens and playgrounds as the valleys below face historic drought and heat. “These ecosystems are going to be more important than ever and they’re going to privatize faster than ever,” he says.  At the same time these landscapes are facing unprecedented threats, he says we have a chance to restore our relationship with these high and little-known places: “We can make these ecosystems healthy again. We have a far longer history of being a benefit to these ecosystems than we have as a detriment.”  The real results of his studies here will depend on lengthy lab testing and will involve peer review and publishing. He hopes to submit his findings for publication in the months to come.  “How long do you expect to be surveying up here?” I ask Dersam.  “For the rest of my life,” he says. “There’s probably 30 life spans of work in the Beartooths. And that’s a single mountain range. In truth, we know absolutely nothing about these ecosystems.” Nick Mott is a Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative reporter for Mountain Journal and High Country News. He is a multimedia journalist based in Livingston, Montana, who focuses on the environment, wildlife, climate and public lands. The post ‘It should not exist’: Ancient archaeological mystery revealed high in Beartooth Mountains appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less