Okay, for those of you who tried the elk counting challenge, I came up with 107 elk in that photo. (No, not in the smaller version that's in the entry, but in the larger image that was linked to it. My eyes aren't that sharp! And if you missed it, too bad. That Grouse Pic has been replaced by another from today.)

Haven't transcribed my flight tape yet, but it looks like we found about 90-100 elk more than we expected. Which isn't too awful surprising, since we haven't had a good count the past two years.

A lot can change in two years. Just a slight bump up or down in your calf production, and boom, just like that, you're either way high or way low in elk.

So, the warden for that area and I took advantage of the two-hour drive to our meeting to discuss what we wanted to do about the extra elk come next fall. And seem to have arrived at harvest quotas that we can both live with.

Now I just gotta justify them. And all our other hunting season proposals.

By next Wednesday.

Oh, joy.

Fortunately, as unprepared as I was for defending my seasons at today's meeting, my ideas were fairly uncontroversial compared to others', so we skated by pretty easy.

The morning drive up was gorgeous, with the country covered with a thick, fluffy blanket of new white. The antelope we passed seemed to be less than thrilled with the cover over their food, though. The evening's high winds should take care of that problem in most places.

It was a little nippy. The two cats had a third feline as company in their barn window for a morning sunbath.

Now, sundogs are pretty common in our country in winter. Those little patches of colour that sit off to the left or right of the sun when it's behind a cloud of ice crystals. And I've known that those little colour patches are actually small pieces of a theoretical rainbow circle around the sun.

Have actually seen the entire circle occasionally, from a plane. But that's always been looking down into the ice crystal cloud, with the plane's shadow dead center in the circle.

Today, we got to see the whole circle from the ground.

It was certainly brighter on the left and right sides, but these arches were much larger than any I had seen before. And if you looked close, you could see the rest of the rainbow ring around the sun.

Gorgeous.

And I had a game warden driving who didn't mind stopping for a picture or two.

Even though we were running late.