Above and beyond the shimmering Sunlight Basin, beneath Lulu Pass, above Crazy Creek—broad, stony, shallow, glimmering cleanly under the gray-banded sky—we drove like a black beetle with three eyes among a valley hidden beneath the green gums of two world-sundering rows of iron-gray teeth.

Our way wound along the shoulder of the eastern peaks, rising deceptively low to our right, meandering northward from Wyoming toward Cooke City, Montana, past Hancock Ranch.

To the left, west along the tiny world of the elevated creek bottom, above green grass meadows and yellowing stands of wide-trunked aspen, marched ominous gray-stone mountains, their earthy shoulders clustered with deep green pine, their grim faces carved by some ancient force, which might have been a cosmic claw.

Ahead, it becomes clear that these awful, stone-faced monsters kneel before their betters as two black towers—one a gnarled spire, the other a soaring blade—soared into the mist-wracked sky they pierced like knife and spear, the granite hafts bulking at the base of the mountain points dressed in white.

So, in mid-September, do these sentinel stones warn of winter to come.