"You keep that up, and we'll have to start calling you 'LuRay'".

This from the pilot to me, when we had less than ten minutes left in our evening flight.

Yes, we were tracking our collared elk again. With our flight money almost spent, we've been down to just once a month now. Eight of our ten girls were almost back to their normal calving areas last month, and those eight were all where they needed to be this month.

One was even right next door to their kindergarten pond.

The other two? Well, last month, they still had a ways to go. But the Colorado gal is back on King Solomon Creek, so I assume her spring migration is done.

Gave me a chance to view a favored mountain peak again.

Number 10, our Continental Divide-crossing, mountain range circling cow elk?

She's still on the Pacific side. If she follows her pattern of the previous two springs, she'll cross over the mountains into the Atlantic basin sometime in the next two weeks. Haven't plotted it all out yet, but her annual circumnavigation of the mountain range must cover over 120 miles every year.

Ever looked down on a flying bald eagle?

Well, actually, they look pretty much the same as when you're looking up at them. Big dark bird, white head, white tail.

Still cool to see, even if it was a few hundred meters into that other state.

But, this likely being our next-to-the-last flight following these elk, I tried taking pictures of just about everything. Hence the pilot's comment about renaming me.

I figured it out as we shuffled up the tarmac to the hangar. Just over 450 pictures.

In a 72-minute flight.

That's like, one picture every ten seconds.

Geez.

Yes, many of them are crap. At least two of the back of the pilot's head. A couple of the console, and several I have no idea what they have in them. But there may be a gem or two.

But basically, there's a lot of green. Green hills, green meadows, green creek bottoms, green mountains, green trees.

Kinda nice.

And my tally didn't include the shot of the pilot, reaching outside the plane from the pilot's seat to screw in the outside screw holding his window bracket on.

No, we weren't flying at the time.

And no, I didn't take pictures of us replacing five screws that had fallen out of the wings sometime before our flight. Who knows how long they've been gone, but the pilot thought it might be bad if parts of the wings fell off while we were flying, so we replaced them before we took off.

Still don't know where the loose screw I found in a crevice of the strut came from.