It gives a commanding view of the valley.

You have to drop down a rutted two-track to get to the bench, but from there you can glass two different mountain meadows, the creek bottom, and the east face of the high peak.

Some years those meadows and valley are full of antelope, and I have sat for probably nearly an hour on that bench, trying carefully to classify each and every antelope as either doe, fawn, adult buck or yearling buck. Being careful not to count any on the far hillside, as that is another herd entirely, and someone else's field of data.

Some years the meadows are empty.

Like today.

Not really empty, though. Just empty of antelope. The left meadow, banked on the uphill side by aspens and pines, had five feral horses feeding in it. And a bull elk just leaving, wandering off into the sage, letting loose a bugle to the damp, cool air as he did.

Breakfast was over, I guess.

But I still needed to check for antelope higher up, above the slope where 81 elk were feeding. Time to turn around and struggle up the rutted two-track.

Now, I've been parking here for quite a few years. So I knew there were rocks behind me that I had to avoid while turning the truck around. And I backed up just fine, missing the rocks, ready to turn uphill when I stopped to admire the view of the granite rocks far to the north.

And then I noticed something. Something I had never noticed before.

Those rocks I was carefully veering my tires around?

Are in a ring.

A tepee ring. I've been parking by a tepee ring all these years, and hadn't even noticed.

Not that it was really a ring for a tepee, I know. Yes, Indians left rings of rocks behind in their campsites, the rocks that were used to hold the lower edge of the tepee down to the ground. But nobody camped up here. Like us modern folks, they tended to camp near water, near meadows, and out of the wind.

No, these rock rings up on exposed ridges are usually sites where they dried buffalo hides. The rocks were used to hold the fleshed hide down in the wind, so it would dry more quickly.

Immediately it occurred to me that there ought to be more drying rings around. And there was. A second one, a little less obvious than the first.

And just across the two-track road.

I'll never know who the women were who worked here. Nor how long ago.

But they had a nice view.