We roared across the Wyoming-Utah border at sunset; windows down, stereo cranked, muffler cracked. Behind the wheel was a well-tattooed, pierced 24-year-old. Riding shotgun, a 44-year-old writer with three-day-old stubble (that would be me). And in the back, buried beneath coloring books and blankets, a cherubic boy. We were all three in search of goats.

“This truck is going to fall apart,” announced my 4-year-old son, Bodi, his mouth full of baby carrots. Abe, a longtime family friend, ignored the comment, pushing his rusty Toyota even faster. Sage and tumbleweed stretched across the flatlands; beyond, on the horizon, was our destination: the Uinta Mountains, a half-million acres of forgotten wilderness.

Ten miles past Sulphur Creek Reservoir, we turned down an unmarked dirt lane. Clay Zimmerman, a 56-year-old retired Air Force mechanic, waited for us outside a vinyl-sided house. Clay may be the only person on the entire planet who rents pack goats. (Pack goats are as beloved as household pets to their handlers, and if there were any other goat renters out there, I couldn’t find them.)

The argument for goat packing goes something like this: To begin, as relatively small animals, they are easy to handle. Requiring neither lead nor halter, trained goats will happily follow in a hiker’s footsteps all day. Better still, goats can go places horses can’t, eat things horses won’t (including woody and poisonous plants) and survive for days without water. According to John Mionczynski — whose book, “The Pack Goat,” I’d stumbled upon years earlier — properly trained goats make strong, hardworking and disciplined pack animals, with an intelligence and loyalty that rivals dogs’.