Just a view to put things into perspective.

The two high points with all the radio towers on them?

That's the peak that everyone else knows by the name on the maps. But that I, and probably I alone, now know is really Scotty McKay Peak.

Most winters, that is the northern extent of where our elk winter. Five of the ten elk collared last winter were captured within a few miles of those towers.

Just beyond, you can see the reflective buildings of our community.

Yeah. They're that close. We're tracking the first elk probably within 7-8 minutes of takeoff. The flight just before Christmas only took an hour, our shortest yet.

Today's would have been equally short, except for elk 644, who decided, without bothering to tell anybody, that she wanted to spend the winter out in the desert, rather than up on the rims. We circled the ridges around the towers several times, climbed higher, circled again.

Pilot was ready to call it quits, and assume her batteries had gone dead. But there was that annoying, faint "cha-ching" static on her radio frequency. Nothing at all like the "beep, beep" the radios are designed to emit, but it was right on her frequency. So, we climbed higher again, to 10,000 feet, and circled wider.

Found her, of course. Her radio banging in hard and strong when we got close. But it took 32 minutes of a 99 minute flight just to get her data point.

Maybe more images from the flight later.