on the winter range

I hadn't even noticed we were at full moon.

Pilot's truck was parked out front as I arrived at the airport, a large cloud of steam rising from the running engine. As usual, the engine was running not to heat the vehicle up for us, and our brief ride to the hangar, but for his old dog that almost always waits for him in the back seat. Got a brief chuckle from him (the pilot, not the dog) as I hopped out of the truck to snap a quick shot of sunrise, before we headed out onto the tarmac.

We have to shovel and sweep the drifted snow away from the hangar doors before pulling the plane out.

As we head out to the taxi strip, the pilot greets the pilot of the landing UPS plane by name, who in return gives us a flying report.

It's a great morning, crystal calm air.

Except close to the ground, where it's pretty bumpy.

Great. That's exactly where we'll be flying. (And he was right. It was bumpy.)

The morning shadows are long as we gather speed on the runway...

and seconds later we're over town, just barely touched by the morning sun.

The sun's rays are just reaching the crests of the ridges we need to search.

We find the first elk's signal just minutes later, near Scotty McKay's Peak, and four others within the next nine minutes. Which has me frantically trying to write their coordinates down whilst the pilot is already twisting and dipping the plane on the trail to the next signal.

Urg.

I fumble for the sick sack I pack in my breast pocket, and for the rest of the flight, there I am. Clipboard on my lap, camera and pen in my right hand, GPS and sick sack in my left.

But I never actually used the sick sack, so my record is still intact.

We usually don't see the elk we're tracking, especially flying high enough to stay out of the worst of the bumpy air. We sometimes see their tracks.

But more often, all we know is that, according to the radio signals, there is at least one elk somewhere down in that draw.

There are no more signals on the northern portion of the winter range...

so we head south. There we pick up a sixth collared elk, off the rims along the Continental Divide to the west. South of the coalbed methane wells.

Then it is further south into the sandhills.

This is the most productive winter range around, with both mule deer and elk thriving in the mixture of sagebrush, bitterbrush, rabbitbrush, and chokecherry that abounds in these sandy soils. More than a third of the winter range burned 15-20 years ago, and while the burn looks nice and lush in the spring and summer, it is in the winter, after the snow falls, that you can best see what we lost, and are just now starting to regain.

There are elk tracks all over the sandhills, but we rarely see one with all the tall shrubs around. We find two of our collared elk here, both in unburned areas.

We find our ninth elk in the higher rims above the sandhills, and then we start touring southeast for our tenth and last elk. Our gal who emigrated to Colorado for the summer and fall, but has been racing back since the end of November. There are heavy trails of elk tracks on the ridges below us, all headed west towards the sandhills. And five or six miles up these trails we find our last elk, still working her way towards winter range.

Then it is homeward bound for us, cutting across the Continental Divide. We spot a few wayward bands of elk in the higher hills and ridges.

But as we near the Divide, there is naught to see on the Pacific side but white. And one lone stand of trees near the crest of the Divide.

Then it over the Divide, past the rims we flew just last week in the helicopter, the steam plumes of home rising beyond.

And just over an hour after we left, we're circling back to land.

Before the dog has even started to get cold in the back seat.