Friday's entry, finally written...

It was more a sanity trip than anything else. Yes, it would be wise to head out and scout the routes to some of my leks ahead of time, in the warm daylight. Avoids wasting mornings to find a road clased off dark and early or, worse, getting stuck.

Dark and early.

So, as soon as the paperwork was in the mail, the heelers and I headed out to see what Thursday's storm did to us.

Well, it left a lot of snow.

And we discovered, as the weather forecasters had forecast, Thursday's storm wasn't really quite over.

As predicted, we had "snow flurries". Now, I know everybody in the temperate regions gets snow flurries, but here in the big open, we get to see the entire flurries, not just have them pass through.

Giant thunderheads that race across the desert on skirts of snow. And in between these flurry clouds?

Wide gaps of sunshine, with blue skies. It's an interesting effect: winter... spring. Winter... spring. Over and over, about a half hour apart.

Not surprisingly, the first road to a lek that we scouted was blocked.

Just as soon as we left the highway.

Did provide an opportunity for the first dragrace of the evening, however.

We were able to get several miles off the highway before finding the road to our next lek also blocked by snow.

I was surprised by the oil pump. It wasn't there last year.

These spring blizzards are a concern, since most critters that survived the past winter are presumed to be in fairly dire straits. So I was a little surprised to find two pronghorn bucks who apparently had enough spare energy to practice sparring with their brand new horns.

Can't be doing too badly if you can waste time and energy pushing each other around.

We could make it to the next lek, but just barely. No way to continue on to the other three leks on down that road. So we turned around and headed back to the highway.

After a short race, of course.

This time, as we switched roads, the red buttes were in Spring.

The two-track leading to our next lek was completely covered in snow, maybe 4-6" deep. But it was late in a warm day, and the snow soft, so we charged on in. And a couple miles later found ourselves parked at the point where I can overlook this lek.

The lek was completely white with snow, of course, but there, on the lek, were...

A bunch of dark specks.

Grouse.

Strutting grouse.

Not unheard of, of course. Sage grouse strutting in the evening instead of morning isn't that uncommon. Although, it's always been a little after sunset when I've seen it in the past.

Here we are, a full hour before sunset.

And usually the evening strut is just males, prepping and testing themselves before the serious breeding occurs at night. But here we had hen as well.

Thirteen cocks, and at least nine hens.

Wow. Real data. Quite a bonus for what was supposed to just be a scouting trip.

Best I can figure, the birds were comfortable being out because of the lousy light, caused by a snowflurry passing behind us to the west. Like this one behind the lek.

And sure enough, once the storm passed and direct sunlight fell on the lek, exposing those dark little grouse tidbits to any wandering eagles, the strutting ended, and everyone moseyed into the sage for cover.

By the time the next wave of flurries had formed by the mountains and started to breeze across the basin, the lek was empty.

Time for one more drag race...

and then it was time to go.