Doug was wondering what the other side of this ridge looked like.

Well, happen to have a picture of that, too. Several, in fact. This may be the best.

His question that this might be a dike (a verticle ridge left after hard magma squeezes into a crack in softer rock and solidifies, only to be left standing when the softer rock wears away) is a good one, until you see the layers in the mountain from the sunny side.

Clearly not a formation of magma. Haven't visited with anyone on the creation of this narrow ridge, but I'm guessing, with some confidence, that it's just a narrow arete left after glaciers slowly ripped the mountain apart from both sides.

So, thanks to Doug for saving me the trouble of having to write a real entry for today.

A day spent mostly in front of the tube, with the wife, the heelers, and a Crossing Jordan marathon.

Not mentioning the interview with the reporter, the calls from pilots (The elk-capturing helicopter is in hometown tonight, should be after deer about 50 miles north of you tomorrow, and up with us by Wednesday. With any luck the warden got up today, and we now know where our elk are.), and trying different marking pens to put numbers on elk collars.

And I forgot to mention this, yesterday. Finally got some yellow and red coloured tape on the elk radio collars (the collars come a perfectly elk-coloured brown)yesterday, and tested the signal from each one with the receiver that came back from the factory on Friday.

Without a manual, and using decades-old non-digital technology, took a while to figure out how to program and use the receiver. But once I did, I popped off the magnet on the side of each collar (There is no on/off switch on telemetry collars. Put a magnet in exactly the right spot on the side, and the radio goes off. Take away the magnet, and the radio starts beeping. And yes, there have been reports of researchers forgetting to take off the magnets when they collar some critter. Ooops.) and made sure they beeped.

They all worked. Programming the scanner to run through the ten frequencies was simple once I remembered how.

Now, the problem is, this scanner picks up the beep...beep...beep..., but does not tell you which frequency is beeping. You have to move through all ten frequencies and find the one with the loudest, clearest beep.

Okay. Kind of a pain. The newer receiver we borrowed from the bear guys will show the numbers of the frequency it has found, but unfortunately will not work in the range of these new collars. This older one will work, but will be a bit of a pain in an airplane.

So, I shut off the tenth collar with its magnet.

The receiver is still going beep... beep... beep....

I check each collar in turn, and each of the ten frequencies in the scanner.

They aren't the source of these beeps.

I go through the range of the receiver, one radio frequency at a time.

The beep is at 149.543 MHz.

None of the elk radios use that frequency.

Into the office I go, checking the ancient, gotta-be-dead coyote, sage-grouse and antelope radios I have.

Not them.

Attach the yagi antenna to the receiver, that H-shaped antenna you see wildlife researchers using to see where a signal is coming from.

It's outside our house.

Out to the street corner, in stockinged feet in the dark, I go.

The source of the beeps is either north, or south of us.

Maybe tomorrow I'll hook up the antenna again, and go find out who has a radio collar beeping in their house.

And why.

This could be fun.