The alarm went off before six o'clock.

Just like it was supposed to.

But after a long three days of 12+ hours at check station, I couldn't find the will to get myself out of bed.

And the heelers weren't helping, snuggling up to me and the wife like it was the middle of the night, in the middle of winter.

We finally left home at a quarter after seven, an hour later than planned. But the morning's classification route was short, so I figured it would still work out okay.

And it did.

Being an hour later than usual, we caught the antelope and sage grouse coming down for their morning drinks, rather than rousting them from their breakfasts.

And for some reason, where always before every antelope had torn off in a cloud of dust as soon as the rig came into view, today they all just stood and stared, and maybe wandered slowly off a few hundred meters.

I don't know, maybe we should sleep in on this route more often.

Or maybe they all had a hard weekend, too.

After classifying in the basin, it was time to head up the rocky, rutted trail to the top of the mountains.

And an old friend.

The heeler sisters have learned this stop in our route. Instead of tearing off down the road, as is their norm when the door opens, they both bounded off through the sage and mahogany to check out the big, old tree.

Where we had the obligatory photo-op.

Now, I was worried about my friend. A lethal blight has been coming down, slowly, from the north and west.

Lethal to limber pines, just like this one. The mountains 20 miles to the northwest got hit several years ago, and are now covered with brown dying trees and grey skeletons. The added stress of our prolonged drought probably doeasn't increase the trees' chances of survival. So I was afraid I might find a large brown mass, here on the limestone at the edge of the rim.

But she's still green.

Mostly.

There's some brown needles at the tips of some branches. Which is the first sign. But which can also be a lot of other things, too. Only time will tell.

The middle of this old pine was actually heavily brown, but I expected that. She lost a large branch last summer sometime, something I had noted last August.

As expected, all those needles were brown. The surprising thing was, even though there was only 6-8cm of bark still connecting the branch to the trunk, quite a bit of the branch was still green.

After over a year.

Tough old tree.

And somebody has been busy emptying out the hollow trunk, with all the flicker holes. I suspect a family of Clark's nutcrackers, like the one that flew away as we came up.

And yeah, I suspect that species is named after my distant cousin, William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, who's getting a bunch of new nickels minted in his honour these days (like the one I got Friday).

Now, I spotted a couple coyotes snooping around in the valley far below us, but didn't bother pointing them out to the heelers. But on the way back, we stepped out onto the linmestone rim again to classify a few antelope (bucks) that were down below. As we headed back to the truck, really faint coyote yipping and howling came wafting over the rim from far below.

Which soon had two heelers back at the lip of the canyon, barking back.

The last leg of our morning route, also up on top of the desert mountains, runs us through the electric fence and up onto another mahogany bench. Usually a good spot to surprise some mule deer.

But the only thing in the mahogany was an antelope buck.

The deer, it turns out, were bedded in a shady draw on the other side of the truck.

We found the last antelope of the morning on the road back to the highway, standing on top of the highest ridge around.

He saw us, only a little over 100 meters away, but was totally unconcerned. Keeping his attention on the other side of the ridge, where earlier we had seen another buck. The rut is definitely here.

The bucks are turning dumb.

And now, it is time to go out and do another route.