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Mystery of the Sacred

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Leslie

I’d been wanting to see a series of pictographs in the desert nearby.  So the other day my friend took me out to see them.  The hike is about 6 miles round trip.  The trip out there is through flat sagebrush country.  For a long ways it doesn’t seem like there’s anything of interest.  Then suddenly the landscape shifts into deep ravines and rocky cliffs.  Near the top of a series of cliffs, a narrow valley appears.  Walking through this rift in the rocky scape, there is a palpable sense of the Sacred.  The cliffs loom high and they all have excellent writing surfaces on them.  But most are empty.  Curiously, there are natural perfect circles of a different kind of rock decorating the sandstone faces.  These natural shield shapes fool you into thinking they’re manmade.

A few official signs along the way tell you these pictographs you’re approaching are special and not to be touched or defaced.  My friend says 7 years ago there was no trail nor signs.  Since then people seemed to have discovered this place because the trail is worn and shows fresh signs of footprints and horseprints.

View from the valley

The sandstone cliffs

The valley is so quiet.  There is a somber aura here that evokes the sacred.  The high cliffs have a cathedral-like feel.  Finally we arrive at the rock with the pictographs.  My friend tells me they are fairly recent, within the last 500 years.  The rock faces east and is in the shade, which is a relief on this unusual 70 degree March day.  The paintings are very faint but you can make them out.

Look closely to see the figures

An area in the rock is chipped where the people who made these got the red coloring.

Where the red color comes from. Maybe why they chose this rock to paint

Down below, in another rocky outcropping, are a few more well preserved shields that lack the figures associated with the ones higher up.

Another painted rock much less eroded

These pictographs are sacred to the Crows.

Why are they here?  Curiously, there is no water nearby and the paintings are in a place that is isolated and hard to get to.  Although we can never get into the minds of the tribesmen who painted these, its fun to imagine what might have been going on there.  Were there several artists or just one?  Was this part of a vision quest or someone passing time in the shaded side of the valley waiting for game, or fellow travelers?  Was this a signpost or message on a well traveled trail?  I suppose it will forever remain a mystery.

Filed under: Crow Indians, Pryor mountains | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Playing with Fire

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Leslie

Fire have always fascinated and followed me.  As a kid I played with matches, but who didn’t.  I grew up in Hollywood, not too far from the ‘Hollywood’ sign and next to lots of open space hills.  I had my fire escape route planned out by the time I was 4.  I’d lay awake at night thinking about the 2 or 3 things I’d grab when the big one came.  At 6 years old, the Big One did come.  My mother was out of town; my father and big sister were at the movies, and I was with the babysitter.  A large out of control fire was roaring up the hillside near the Observatory, just blocks from my house, at night.  The babysitter awakened me to tell me we had to evacuate. I watched that night fire so close to my house.  It was a beautiful sight.  Huge sparks fell on my house roof.  I didn’t want to leave.

During the summers it was routine to watch the brush fires being fought by the fire department from my house.  I even remember watching and eating cookies.  One summer when I was nine, at a camp on Catalina Island an hour from Avalon, a large fire broke out. Only myself and another girl were around.  We pulled the fire alarm, alerted the rest of the campers, and let the horses loose.

As I grew up and moved to Northern California, many times I was the first one at a house fire or wildfire and called the Fire Department.  I’ve never fought a fire, but fire seemed to always be part of my experience.  Given another lifetime, I think I’d go to the Fire Science School at U of Nevada.

So when my retired fire fighter friend woke up yesterday morning and said “Let’s burn the big brush pile”, I thought “YES”.   Its the brush pile I’ve written about before, the leftovers from the logging they did this winter.

Brush pile before we burned. Dog for reference of size.

There’s several of them scattered over many different properties.  I don’t have land on the forest, so I don’t have any of my own.  But my absentee neighbor had a huge one and it was blocking my perfect view.  I certainly didn’t want to look at that thing all summer, and I’ve been trying to help him figure out how he could get help, since he lives so far away, to burn it.

The weather’s been warm and the snow is gone.  But several nights ago we had a light dusting and it was a cold, high humidity day.  With the ground still frozen and the wind low, here was our chance.

I’ve been learning a lot from my friend G. about fire and burning.  We’ve burned a lot of brush piles together from my upper cabin area, piles of beetle killed and infested pines.  But this pile was humongous, at least 75′ x 30′ x 12′ high!  There were lots of big logs as well as brush in there.  It was dry and it was going to alight easily.

We started as the sun was going down.  With the cooler temperature and higher humidity, and less chance of wind, the evening is the best time for a burn like this.  G.  began by lighting the pile from 4 or 5 different sides and directions.  Pretty soon both ends came together and, here’s the video…

I put the dog at the end for reference.  By the way, I was filming from that far back because it was hot.  ‘Hotter than hell’ as they say.

Soon night came.  We were out there for hours.  I laid down and watched the sparks rise high against the night sky.  Fire whorls burst out in small areas, like white hot tornadoes, reminding me of a witches’ brew.

The fire as night fell quickly. The stars came out. See person on right side for scale.

I could see the fire from my bedroom window.  It’s not too far from my house.  Periodically during the night I’d awaken and look out the window.  Always it was burning, burning. That night I had the funniest dream:    While in the mountains, someone said “haven’t you read the news”.  I hadn’t.  “There’s been an economic meltdown and fires are burning all over the city.”  Meltdown, fire, economy…funny connections.

By morning it had burned down and we chunked the pile together with a loader.  It had been a fantastic night.

Fun's over.

Filed under: Fires | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Old first hand Stories of Yellowstone

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Leslie

My old neighbor JB told me this story today.   Its impossible to place it in time.  In JB’s mind it was like yesterday, but probably in reality sometime in the late ’50’s or early 60’s.

“My job was to plow the road from Mammoth to Cooke City.  There were two plows going and it was Christmas day.  It was 60 below zero, really really cold.  Those plows aren’t heated, you know.  You’ve gotta keep the window cracked too, otherwise the windshield freezes up with ice and you can’t see.  So it’s 60 below outside, no heat, and the window’s cracked.”

I asked him how he stayed warm.

“You just put on more clothes!  The snow was 4 or 5 feet deep and I got a call on the radio from the couple staying at the Buffalo Ranch.  His wife was going into labor and they were stuck.   I was going around a curve on my way to Tower, as fast as I could which wasn’t too fast in a plow, when I saw a patch of clear road ahead.  I knew that meant trouble.  The other plow was a few minutes ahead and a clear patch meant he’d gone off the road.  When I got there the plow was completely off the road, tipped over, and the driver was buried under the snow.  At 60 below he didn’t have much time and it was good I was just behind him.”

“I started digging him out and when I got to him he said ‘Lunch box’.  He kept repeating that.  I didn’t know he had a heart condition and his medication was in his lunchbox.  I never found that lunchbox.  They got him over to Billings.  He was pretty mangled up and didn’t work for over 2 years.”

“Then I started plowing my way to the Buffalo Ranch.  I finally got that couple unstuck.  She never got further than Mammoth where she had her baby.  That was Christmas Day.  I didn’t get home till 3 am.”

I had a client whose father, Merrill Daum, worked in Yellowstone from 1925 to 1930, first as the Chief Engineer then eventually as Assistant Superintendent to Horace Albright.  Daum spent the first several years working on oiling the roads.  Here are a few story excerpts from a memoir my client gave me.

We had an epidemic there one year.  They had quite a few cases of the tourists coming down sick after they’d been there at Old Faithful Inn during the afternoon and evening.  They came down with vomiting.  They really were sick.  It broke out at the Lake.  Then to Canyon.  The Lake was where they really had the epidemic.  One hundred or so sick people there.  We had to go around shooting them all with a needle.  I don’t know what we injected them with.  To relax them so they wouldn’t vomit themselves to death.  They put four of us at the table morning, noon, and night at the Lake Hotel and we were each to eat different things, not the same thing to see what food was causing our troubles.  None of us got sick.  THey just threw up on the floors, every place they got caught.

Bears came on our porch on that duplex we lived in at Mammoth.  I finally got tired of bears once and I took an apple, filled it with red pepper, pinned it together and put it on the porch.  That bear came up and swallowed that and all of a sudden he was blowing and wiping his nose in the snow, trying to get cool.  He really was hot.  He never bothered us again.

At Yellowstone we were building a highway out near Canyon and Lake areas and our construction crew was in tents.  The bears would keep coming in and get the food out of the kitchen.  I was there once in the daytime and here was a Grizzly.  They’re beautiful animals.  The sun would glisten on the beautiful points on their fur.  This darn grizzly was walking home with a sack of oats.  Just walking right off with it.  A sack of oats about 75 pounds.  Nothing we could do about it.  They did take a lot that first year.  You weren’t allowed to kill them.  You could sit right there next to the garbage and they wouldn’t bother you.  All they wanted was to dig in the garbage.  The worst place where I chased one bear was at West Thumb.  The bear came in there that fall, before the snows.  I happened to go around the store which had candies and things like that and the shopkeeper had the windows all closed.  The place was broken into and there was the bear inside, just gorging himself on candy.  I’ll never forget how surprised that bear was for somebody to come in and find him.

We had to get ready to remove the snow in the spring. We started at Cody, about 30 miles from Cody up to the entrance.  We got as far as the Park with snow 12-20 feet deep.  We’d blast it out with TNT which Uncle Sam gave us.  That would start it thawing and then we’d take a big power shovel and shovel the stuff so we had a two-way highway through there to the east entrance of the Park.  From there on in we’d use our own equipment.  The deep snow was right there at the entrance.  That was the high point.  We’d generally try to get open by June 1st.  By June 6th we were officially open, I believe.  But you couldn’t make some of the interior trips that early.  It would be long in July before you could get away from the snow.

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Tipi Rings

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Leslie

I thought I’d do a short post on a few teepee rings I’ve seen.  The other day I was in Cody with some time to kill.  I’d heard there were tipi rings on the north side of the Shoshone river by Trail Creek.  A friend told me the historical wisdom-lore was that many tribes gathered there during the winter months to camp by the hot springs.  Most of those springs are now either extinct, buried under the damn, or on private lands.  In fact, the bulk of the rings, apparently 100’s of them, are on private lands going up the traditional passage of Trail Creek.

Walking along the shores of the Shoshone River (called the Stinking Water River before it was changed due to popular [and probably economic] demand)  you can still occasionally smell sulfur .  The rings are obvious, easy to pick out.  They’re incredibly close together; some even still have fire rings in the center.  Compared to the rings in other places, these looked fairly recent, maybe 150 years old.  Why?  Because the rocks are not very buried.

Cody tipi ring with fire ring in middle

Another view of several rings outside Cody

This is an excerpt from Plain Feather about the death of Crow Chief Sits in the Middle of the Land while Plain Feather was camped outside of Cody:

“About a year after the big battle on the Little Bighorn (1876), a small band of Crows went hunting from the Yellowstone to the Stinking River…The band reached the Stinking River a short distance below where the city of Cody now is located.  Here Chief Sits in the Middle announced that he was going south to a valley where there were still some buffalo left.  The other group decided to follow up the Stinking River to the big mountains where there were plenty of deer and bighorn sheep.

My family was with this latter group.  That evening we made camp at the forks of the river just above the narrow canyon where a dam is now located.  Towards evening we sighted two horseback riders galloping in our direction.  They were messengers from the other group.  They announced that the great chief and his wife suddenly became ill and soon died. They said we were to hasten over there.  It is believed that they died of pneumonia.

Immediately teepees came down and we were soon on our way.  We arrived early the next morning, just in time for the burial.  The bodies, strapped in robes, were taken to the rimrocks of the valley and put into a ledge and then covered up with slabs of rocks.  The burial mourning followed, with men and women wailing.  They recounted the many great things that the chief did for his people for many years.  At that time he was the Chief of All Chiefs, reigning over the two main bands of the Crow Nation.”**

(**Note:  In the late 1960’s, the Chiefs’ remains were relocated from nearby Meeteetsie to the Crow Agency in Montana.)

Now compare those rocks with the rocks in the rings below.  These rings were along the Bighorn River in Bighorn Canyon.  The rings are right beside the main road, which follows the ancient travel route of the Crows.

Another view along Bighorn canyon

Big Horn Canyon rings

Here are some much older rings near the town of Clark.

Clarks fork tipi rings, much older

I spent a few hours walking along the plateau near the mouth of the Clark’s Fork Canyon, an area where tribes traveled for the fall Buffalo hunt.  There are rocks galore there, and although I could pick out some rings, they couldn’t be photographed as they were very obscure and some of it might have even been my vivid imagination.  Most of the rings seemed much smaller, probably no more than 6′ in diameter compared to these larger rings.  But the setting was right–on the table above the river with a wide view of the surroundings.

I love finding these rings.  They spur my imagination and kindle a sleeping spirit.  The very soil emits stories I’m awaiting to hear.

Filed under: Indigenous cultures, Pryor mountains | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Elk in the Valley

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Leslie

This is the week the collared elk get their ‘check-ups’–sonogram, blood, and other indicators.  In order to do that, these elk need to be located and darted from a helicopter.  Then the biologists are lowered down, do their thing within just a few minutes, and are whisked away again to their next elk, while the elk is waking up.  This is the last year of a five year study to find out why the elks’ pregnancy rates are so low in my valley.

Helicopter getting ready

I’ve been watching them on and off as they work the valley.  The copter pilots are amazing.  They’re Kiwis, the best mountain copter pilots around.  With no doors, they dress in super warm suits, land in odd and uneven terrain, and maneuver quite close to trees, cliffs and mountain tops.

Watching them work, I couldn’t help but remember when I went river rafting on the South Island of New Zealand.  The rafting adventure began at the head of a glacier and in order to get there we needed to ferry all our equipment, including ourselves, by helicopter up the canyon.  I boarded the copter, fully expecting to fly above the canyon and set down on the glacier.  But instead, the pilot took off inside the narrow canyon, running those curves like a race car with the raft waving around tied below us.  The copter seemed to swing freely side to side, hanging by the propeller above.  It was so scary that I decided to just accept whatever might come and enjoy the fantastic ride.

Copter in my valley

One of the students explained that the biologists on board are from Oregon and pioneered these elk allocation studies.  Most of these elk are not residents.  In other words, they don’t live here year round.  Instead, they come in around January from the Park, snow pushing them towards warmer terrain.  Sometime around late April or May, they begin to make their way back into Yellowstone to have their calves.  From what the student heading the study tells me, 6 out of every 10 calves succumb to predators, mostly grizzlies coming out of hibernation with an appetite and the calves are easy prey in their first 10 days. 

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But this study is looking at low pregnancy rates amongst this group.

I spent some time talking with one of the Game & Fish biologists about what’s being called sudden Aspen death in Colorado.  Reminds me of Sudden Oak Death (SOD) in California which I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about.   My own theory with SOD has to do with lack of fires.  Fires have been cleansing the soils in California (and the West) for thousands of years, clearing out fungus as well as competing undergrowth.

This biologist had worked in south WY and felt that the Aspens, bereft of fires, are in the process of a natural rejuvenative cycle so young clones can arise.  He told me a story about early settlers being angry at Native Americans in the Sierra Madres for setting fire to aged forests.  Those Indians gardened the landscape with fire as their tool, aiding the regenerative process in Aspens.  With a fire suppression policy blanketing the West for over 100 years, forest health has declined as well as quality of feed for our native ungulates.

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The Eternal and the changeable

Posted on February 28, 2010 by Leslie

I haven’t lived here much time, but it’s confirmed by my neighbors and friends that in the past year there’s been lots of enormous changes in the valley.  When so few people live around you, the impact of just one becomes magnified.  And although we all live different lives, seemingly unconnected, we are connected through the fabric of this Place.

Just in the last year several long time residents (or part-timers) have died.  Others have moved or are intending to sell.  Friends I made amongst the ranch hands have left.  The students I’ve come to enjoy doing the animal studies are closing up shop.  And a few of the older permanent residents have gone to town where there are more health services.

The small forest on private lands next door to me was logged this winter for beetle killed trees.  The left over devastation of debris, tractor compaction, blow down trees, channel-less streams, and icy mayhem seems a good visual metaphor for the human disruption in the valley.  The beetles were moving silently in a natural tempo.  The humans’ business is helter-skelter.

Change is inevitable, but so much is hidden when you live in a city or burbs.  In the bustle of its’ cultural homogeneity, flow and movement is a fast tick-tock.  Life just keeps going without pause and mostly without notice.

Yet in this Place where geological ‘eternity’ records time, every life is noticed, even the deaths of small things.

Weird clouds over Pat O'Hara

Black Bear

Like the lapping of the tides, the movement of mountains exudes a slow rhythm.  The mountains, valleys, and rivers are sentinels, the guardians of this Place.  Any perturbation in that cadence stands out like shouts or a piercing of the fabric.  Every moment matters and its memories are vivid colors.

This tree went through some stuff

I now understand how my 86 year old neighbor, who grew up here,  has such a great memory for details; details like the names of people he knew long ago, or the exact date when he took some dudes out to the Thoroughfare; or the snowstorm on Bald Ridge where he couldn’t see in front of him and had to follow the fence lines.

Incoming summer storm

My memories are more muted, faded.  So much was compressed and the colors were all human dramas against a setting of more human dramas.  There was no eternal, unchanging, larger than life backdrop to hold the dramas within.

While I struggle to find my place again, make new friends, fill or mourn those empty spaces and regain a kind of footing, the mountains remind me of that which is unchangeable.  And even though it’s all illusion–mountains and rivers, valleys and glaciers, do move and change in time–their mere presence connects us with our slowness.

I caught a story on radio last week about the Okinawans.  Their island contains some of the longest living people on earth and have been studied up and down for ‘why’.  The conclusion is not what you’d think.  It’s not diet, or exercise, nor special herbs, or even genes.  It’s their slowness.  No hurry, no worries.  Like the mountains, or the lapping of the tides, or the Bristle Cone pines, they live a long and slow life.

Full moon rising over Steamboats' saddle

Filed under: Practice of The Wild | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

The wolves have a good day

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Leslie

What a day!  Let’s begin with 4″ of fresh snow.  Then add 5 wolves running past my property, 4 greys and 1 black.    Throw in back tracking and tracking the wolves to explore what route they are using to come down into the valley.  And for the day’s finale, watching the wolves on two kills they’d made by the road this morning.

Lots of elk tracks too on this beautiful day

Around 1 pm, we heard the dogs barking and looked out the front window to see 4 beautiful wolves running along the nearby pastures through a herd of horses.  Those horses are used to dogs so they didn’t seem perturbed one bit.  And those wolves were ‘booking’.  They had someplace to go or a meeting to attend.  Within just a few minutes they were up on the opposite hillside and over the divide, a hike that takes me at least 45 minutes!  Then along came a limpy grey following way behind.  They all looked amazingly healthy, no mange.

Limpy wolf but seems to be doing fine

These are the new Sunlight Pack, pushed slightly south into Elk Creek because of a much larger pack of 10 wolves occupying their northern range.  Last winter I didn’t get a chance to see the Sunlight Pack as they were hanging deeper west in the valley, moving with ease back and forth (north and south) across the valley floor.  This has been their home range for several years.

There’s an elk study going on, in its fifth season, in the valley and they’ve been able to do some good collaring this year of wolves.  And so they’ve learned that the Sunlight Pack has been bullied a bit by this larger pack to the north.  In fact, all that howling I heard on Valentines’ day was the Hoodoo Pack making a kill on the northern side of the river, a side that used to belong to the Sunlight pack.

Tracks of four wolves 'booking it'

At around dusk I went up the road to get a closer look at the kills and see if there were any wolves still  on them.  The UofW crew said they processed the kills and they were two older cow elks, about 10 and 12 years old.  “How old is old for an elk?”  I asked.  “About 15.  Some can live till 20, but that’s really old. These were in pretty good shape,” they informed me.  

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With some quick and dirty math, I figure that’s about 50 or 60 years in human terms.

Filed under: Tracking, Wolf | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Radiant Heat

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Leslie

Its time for another post about beetles, clearcuts, burns, and all that goes with that.

Beetles are demolishing the conifers of our western forests.  Rising temperatures, years of  fire suppression policies, and natural cycles contribute to these changes in our forests.  Its also worth saying that conifers have been around for eons of time, way before insects and angiosperms were on this planet.  At one time you can imagine the whole world covered with conifers.  Their successful strategy of being wind pollinated has allowed them to disperse and survive.

So what’s the fuss?

In the end its all about saving structures.  Man-made structures like our homes.  And money of course.  I don’t disagree with that in essence.  But I do think there is a way to work with nature, taking as much into account as is humanly possible.

Because there is money from the state only this year, rather than over 5 years time, my neighbors had incentive to almost clear cut the forest on their properties, for essentially free.  But the caveat was that the loggers got the dollars and useable wood, leaving the slash piles for the homeowners to take care of.  Thus, there are humongous piles all over the woods now, if you could call what’s left ‘woods’. And the homeowners are trying to figure out what to do with these piles.

Wow, what a gigantic slash pile in front of my house in my neighbor's yard

I too was given the same incentive, but chose not to use a logging company and am looking towards doing my project in a lighter way.  Of course, I don’t have the intense forest of spruce and dead fall they had.  What I have is a more sparse population of Limber Pines, suffering from Blister Rust and some beetle kill.

Last year on my own I began limbing up trees starting with those around my upper cabin, with the intention of over the course of 5 years, completely limbing up all the pines.  Limbing them up to 5-6′ might help the pines fend off the rust.  My logic is for two reasons:  first they avoid contact with the Ribes that likes to grow under and next to the pines. Ribes is a host for the rust.  Second, since the rust is a type of fungus, air circulation can never hurt in helping fight fungus.

When the state forester saw I’d started limbing around the cabin, he and the fire chief were happy.  Its a good step in fire prevention as well.

This year I’m selectively cutting and burning those pines that have active beetles, heavily.  Its been easy to identify.  The trees have pitch tubes where they are trying to pitch out the beetles.  The ones that have a plethora of pitch tubes probably won’t make it.  We’re cutting those and burning them on the spot.

Burn on my property

I also have trees from last year that succumbed to beetles.  I’m cutting those selectively, burning the debris and using the rest as firewood.  The beetles have already flown from those trees.

Then I’ll continue to limb up all the trees and burn the slash.  Finally, we’ll do a night burn where we’ll fix a perimeter and burn a low fuel ground fire to clean up the soil, making it fresh for new nutritious native grasses and the young seedlings I plan to plant to replace those that died.

I’ve noticed there are few young trees amidst the old.  I’ve read that in the White Pine family, as the Clarks Nutcracker distributes the seeds, the most successful germination rates are on new burn areas.  Maybe that is why there are so few seedlings here, as there hasn’t been a burn in probably over 100 years.

I didn’t own any of that spruce forest that I loved to walk in daily.

Devastated spruce forest after intensive beetle logging

Filled with owls, moose, turkeys, deer, black bears, coyotes, martens, squirrels and endless other creatures, I’d see their sign, hear their sounds, and know they found cover and food there.  Now the forest looks like a vast hurricane-like force came whipping through it.  And although nature herself can deal some devastating blows, it didn’t have to go down this way.  I would have made it a 5 year plan, slowly clearing with intention so that areas could grow in with willows and choke cherries, alders and native grasses, keeping cover as I cleared successively.

The forest now. There will be lots of blow down still to come

So what’s the fuss?  Sure, it will grow back in time, although not in my time here.  We humans are like a hurricane.  It takes discipline and conscious effort to go forth gently.  As the old adage goes:  Destroying is easy.  Any one can do that.  Yet creating and sustaining takes work, nurturing and love.  And that is what makes us truly human.

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Right as Rain

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Leslie

Its Valentines’ Day and I’m finally home.

The day was clear and beautiful.  I awoke to a small bit of fresh snow and a beautiful fiery sunrise.

Sunrise over Dead Indian

Last night I watched the elk that overwinter in my valley.  I heard the recent G&F count was 1460.  They come down from the Park when the weather pushes them out.  This year, as last year, they were a bit on the ‘late’ side.  At dusk and dawn they come out of the tree cover to feed.  Here’s a herd of about 700.

Just a small part of the large elk herd behind my house
More elk
Beautiful elk in their winter clothing

The herd is almost exclusively cows and their calves with a few young males, called ‘spikes’ because their antlers are barely branched, if at all.

The whole day the wolves were howling in the valley.  Its mating season and I suppose its also Valentines Day for them too.

We felled some beetle infested trees on my property and did a burn that lasted till after dusk.  The wolves  howled.  The air was still and clear.  The ash fell like snowflakes.  Elk grazed on the flats up above and a lone Great Horned Owl called in the low light of the sky.  I’m back and everything is right as rain.

Brush fire

Filed under: Cody Environs, Fires | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Tracking Club of Marin at Point Reyes

Posted on January 31, 2010 by Leslie

Sorry I forgot my camera.

This morning I finally made it to Tracking Club, a group  I used to frequent when I lived here full time.  The last Sunday of every month the club meets out at Abbots’ Lagoon in Point Reyes.  The club leaders are fabulous, many schooled personally by Jon Young, Tom Brown, or Mark Elbroch. Stations are set up beforehand, people divided into groups, and off we go.

Abbot’s Lagoon is part of Point Reyes National Seashore and a protected sandy dune beach full of habitat.  Its a mile walk out to the lagoon and the tracking often begins with the hike out.  A deer watching us from the shrubs, brush bunnies run bye, and lots of tracks and scat to explore along the way.

My first station with John took the group up along a bluff overlooking the Lagoon.  As we slowly ascended, John pointed out some scat at a crossroads of trails.

“If you were an animal, which way might you travel here?  What would you be doing?  Why do you think the scat is right in the middle of several trail crossings?”  The method is to question, not to answer.  The technique is to get us to think, explore, be interested, become the animal itself, whatever one it might be.  Looked like an old bobcat latrine to me, marking his/her territory.

Higher up we saw some small holes and a ledge with bird droppings, what looked like old pellets, and nearby on the same outcropping was mustelid type scat.  John asked us questions about color, aging, smell, and what we thought the story might have been here.  “Look at the whole environment, all the surroundings”, he kept gently reminding us.

The next station was a muddy trail full of wonderful tracks, some perfect.  Perfect sets of skunk tracks abounded there and a discussion pursued regarding skunk gait–this was a 3-4 gait–and what a lope really was.  Richard got on all fours and demonstrated a skunk lope and how the gait in the mud was so different then the one we always see in the sand.  Besides skunks, there were birds and several types of rodents running around that mud.  “Even mice slip in the mud” Richard observed humorously.

In the final station, Melissa had us investigating an interesting set of large tracks that were grouped like a four-square.  She asked us questions like “Which do you think we the hind feet?”  “What differences do you notice between front and rear feet?”  “How do you think this animal moved?”  Three sets of tracks with long strides eventually made their way into the lagoon.  “What animal might be comfortable going into the water?”

After this, without revealing the animal, we went farther up the dune where a party of these animals had taken place.  Seeing the same tracks made on a slope in dry sand (vs. the wet sand below) was interesting.  What the tracks looked like going uphill vs. downhill was informative.  You could see where the animals finished by sliding down the dune into the water.  What fun.  Otters at play.  And the kick-off was seeing where they had peed, scratched, then rolled in it.  We all smelled that strong mustelid odor.

Later, one of the participants commented that he saw an otter in the water nearby watching us.  I wondered if the otter thought it amusing that we all were smelling his pee.

I love tracking club.  When I started with it, over 3 years ago, the attendance was small, less than 10 people at any time.  Today there were more than 30, including kids, coming from all over the Bay Area.  I love the method of questioning, and taking in all the animal and plant interactions interpreted through track and sign.   This will be my last class this visit.  I can’t wait to do some snow tracking in Wyoming, coming up soon.

So, today we saw tracks/sign for at least these animals that I could figure out:  Skunk, Otter, Coyote, various birds, assorted rodents, deer, Bobcat, Brush Bunnies.  All this just in the small dunes of Abbots Lagoon.

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