Some of the prettiest pictures I'd snapped in the past summer and fall were taken as we headed across the Continental Divide to find one of our roaming elk. As October passed, and we moved into November with no sign of her moving home, we began to suspect she had permanently emigrated herself to the east side of the mountain range.

Then, mid-November, she began to move.

North.

Ooookay. The high country was already socked in with deep snow. If she did want to come home for the winter, she'd have to go north to get around the mountains.

But I was half betting she would find some local elk herd settling in for the winter, and slip in with them. Giving us a flying detour to the east side of the range every flight.

I was wrong.

By the next week, she had continued her northward trek. Staying high in the timber, in heavy snow where we saw no other sign of elk.

And then, on the 1st of December, the scanner picked up her signal as we headed south searching for another collar..

On the west side of the Divide. Far to the west. .

Somehow, elk 582 had crossed the range. Or detoured completely around it. Ending up over 25 miles from her location 10 days before. (For scale, the red squares on the map are townships, six miles on a side. The detour around the mountains would have been an additional 12-15 miles of travel.)

This...

is the mountain range she either crossed or passed around. Three thousand meters high (that's almost 10,000 feet for those of you using archaic measuring systems).

Would love to have had a GPS collar on her, so we could see where she was every two hours of the journey.

But me?

I'm betting she went over the top.

Elk are like that.