Well, I made it up and back safely. No falling asleep at the wheel on this trip to the Wind Rivers for a meeting. Even after arising well before sunrise to check four strutting grounds along the way.

Is it a bad sign when your meeting starts with two different people passing out two different agendas?

One sign of an overused rangeland is a headcut. Without vegetation to cover the bottom of a stream or draw, the water cuts a steep gully into the ground. Then the steep gully starts carving its way up the drainage, with a dropoff or small waterfall where the old, rounded streambed is falling into the new arroyo.

The headcut.

Niagara Falls would be a large example of a headcut.

In the desert, and most other places, headcuts are bad. You lose the streambed vegetation, which is rare and valuable in this desert country, and have only a gully left. Which dumps sand and silt into the river, affecting fish and everything else, every time it rains. Plus, the new streambed is often too low for the roots of just about anything except sagebrush to reach, so you lose your willows, trees, meadows, and just about everything that is pleasant and useful along a stream.

So, it is natural that when habitat people get together they end up talking about headcuts.

But with this meeting, I learned the federal folks now call headcuts "active gradient adjustments".

Really.

When one of the federal gals was explaining that the problem with their satellite imagery maps was that "the pixelated files need to be geo-referenced into polygons", the face of one of the habitat guys from our outfit apparently fell into a dumb-founded stare.

As she pondered how to rephrase the problem so that he might understand, someone else apologized that "He still works with paper".

"Using crayons," the dumb-founded biologist added.

Part of the view on the drive up.