It was a cold flight. As evidenced by the heavily bundled pilot and tracker seated in front of me.

My toes were numb by the time we landed, only 72 minutes after we took off.

We were tracking 12 of the bighorn sheep we'd brought over from Oregon, each one running around with a radio telemetry collar. But the bitter, 23 degrees below zero cold killed the batteries in our com pack, and we had to return to the airport for new ones. So we could hear the collars beep, talk to each other, and to dispatch for our mandatory 20-minute safety checks.

But even with fresh batteries, the communications setup wouldn't let me listen or talk to anyone else. The cold must have frozen something more serious inside.

So there wasn't really any reason for me to go along. I couldn't listen for sheep, I couldn't call in our coordinates to dispatch, I couldn't even point out landmarks to the new recruit responsible for tracking these sheep.

But hell, it was so hard to get in this plane, none of us really wanted to take the time for me to crawl out. Besides...

I had my camera to keep me amused.

So I got lots of shots of our lovely hometown:

(We were fortunate enough to be gone for the holidays when they had yet another accidental release of toxic gases.)

And I even got photos of one of the homes daughter-in-law lived in when she was quite young.

But the only way I knew when we'd found a bighorn is when the pilot would put us in a tight spin over one little spot. We found all 12, fortunately, and none of them were on mortality (when a collar doesn't move at all for eight hours, the tempo of the beeps increases to a rapid, desperate beat). But one ram had left the mountains completely, wandering down to a rocky ridge out in the desert, apparently stopped by the ice on a frozen reservoir.

Quite a few of the others had stirred, as well. Where just a handful of days ago several were grouped together, and four ewes were in pairs, now they were all off by themselves.

Apparently when the bitter cold hit a couple days ago, they all decided to try to walk to warmer climates. But it appears none of them could agree where those warmer places might be. So there were six of them strung out along the northern slopes of the mountains:

(The sixth was underneath us when I took that photo. Somewhere around the second-farthest sheep was where I had to break out my sick sack...)

And the other five were along the south breaks.

Again, one of the five was below us when I took that shot. The wandering ram is just out of the picture on the right, down by the frozen reservoir.

With little else to do, I shot over 300 images on that 72-minute flight. But with little time to crop and edit, I'll leave you with a larger version of the south side: