Thursday evening was our outfit's public hearing on our hunting season proposals for 2004. In River Town. A two-hour drive. With the hearing starting at 19:00.

Not much point in driving all the way home, past dozens of strutting grounds, and then turning around after a brief night's sleep to check those very same strutting grounds at sunrise.

So. Another night sleeping with the birds.

The drive up to River Town was actually fairly pleasant. I had forgone lek surveys Thursday morning, so there was no fatigue. Left plenty early, and stopped to check a geocache along the way, as well as a benchmark (which is too old to be on the internet records).

This was the highway immediately after the benchmark.

If your computer monitor makes this stretch of road look long and incredibly steep, well... your monitor is working just fine. (Drops about 400' in a half-mile or so. Doesn't sound like much until you're looking at it. From either end.)

Public hearing went well. Thirteen citizens attended (all male), with ten of us there to present our proposals. No big discussion or argument over anything, not even the drastic 4-point season proposals for deer herds to the north. When I went through the elk season changes we're recommending to make up for the losses to lichen poisoning, the only question was whether or not any of the elk from one fellow's favorite hunting area ever wintered down there.

Uh, no. The dying elk were fifty miles to the south, and your elk go north to winter. Besides, there's an interstate highway in the way.

Otherwise, they had absolutely nothing to say, pro or con, on my seasons. Which is good, I guess. Boss waved the baggie of lichen I had brought along, in case anyone wanted to see it, and seemed disappointed that not a single person had a single question about what had consumed so much of our lives for the past two months.

But, they could read all about it in the papers, so what questions could there be? (Although one man at one of the open houses I did not have to attend apparently came in claiming the lichen story was all a deception. Apparently one of those folks who sees conspiracy in anything any government entity may say or do. Not quite sure what we were supposed to be covering up, but someone said it had something to do with black helicopters. Maybe aliens, too.)

Got done and out in record time, and hit Arbies for a late dinner. Then it was off through the rain (their first precip since February) to find strutting grouse.

Times have changed with the energy boom. Last year I met exactly one vehicle on this late, lonely highway drive. This time there were at least six, three looking like a rig crew convoy.

Turned south off the highway at Home on the Range, and headed into the desert. The rain had stopped ten miles back, and now the clouds were thinning, allowing me to make out the countryside by the light of the three-quarter moon.

About all that showed was the horizon, and the remnant snowbanks.

The main road across the desert is normally left closed in the winter, until Mother Nature feels fit to open it again. But the past couple years have seen regular traffic going south into the gas fields, which are leaping and creeping north, so the road was kept plowed again this year. With berms of snow piling on the sides.

Now, it has been warm, and those banks of snow are melting fast, leaving pools of water. A little disconcerting when you realize the reason it is so black on the right side of the road is because the road is holding back a small lake.

The fear is, of course, that sometimes those pools flow over into the road. The image doesn't show it well, but the puddle I blasted through here was at least twice as long as the truck.

He who hesitates is lost, you know. And fools charge in...

But pools of water and mud aren't the only things to watch out for on a moonlit drive across the desert. Not all the white things along the side of the road are snowdrifts.

And many times the pools of water in the barrow ditches don't stay there. They overflow across the road, carving deep channels in the erosive sand. Gullys that all seem to be a tire wide and two tires deep. In the olden days, like two or three years ago, you really had to watch yourself driving this road in the spring. But now, with all the regular gas field traffic, most of the runoff ruts have been found and marked.

You just gotta keep a sharp eye out for the steel posts tied with red plastic flagging that mark each ditch.

Only a dozen or so, that night.

Got a few miles past the Divide (yeah, the Atlantic branch of the Continental Divide weaves itself across some non-descript ridges out there in the desert) and turned right on a two-track to head to my regular overnight lek.

And immediately had to veer off the road around a puddle of mud, snow and ice. After the fourth or fifth puddle, in less than a half-mile, I gave up. Midnight is no time to try to get yourself unstuck from mud. Not to mention, if there's still snow on the ridgeline, I know there'll be snow filling the draws I'd have to cross.

Time for plan B.

Which is another strutting ground, just a hundred meters or so off a bladed county road, not three miles east of here.

'Course, it's a little disconcerting when the last vehicle to travel this particular county road was moving on tracks, not wheels.

But twenty minutes before midnight, I had found my lek.

They're there, strutting away in the moonlight. You can't see them in the photo, but I could certainly hear them, and counted at least 11 cocks using the headlights.

And eighteen minutes later, my bed for the night was made.