Himself called from the cabin yesterday evening. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s drive up to Tom Miner and see if we can see bears.” I was in the middle of a project — I took on some freelance work that overlaps with the job-I’ve-quit-but-am-still-working-out-my-notice. I wasn’t at a great stopping place, and today is going to be a crunch, but when your person calls to ask if you want to go bear watching, you say “Great idea!” and “I’m getting in the car.” So that’s what we did. We loaded up the binoculars, a cooler, the dog and…
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So we did actually get out of the car for a bit and go for a little hike. The first place we were going to hike was where the bison were stampeding. It looked good — pretty open country, a nice game trail that went up to the top of the ridge. However, when the German tourists came down from the same game trail we’d been looking at, they told us that there was a bear up in the patch of trees you could see from the road, and that he was “very grümpy” (there was definitely an umlaut on…
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How cool is this? The iPhone has a setting to determine the best exposure lighting, and it caught this eagle taking flight as three images in one photo — This was the second eagle I saw this morning driving in from the cabin. It’s that time of year when all the wildlife is on the move. There were two cow elk behind the 2-unit motel building up at the cabin last night — one came out to graze in the full moon at about 10:30. We were peeking out the high window in the bedroom at her, grazing, maybe 10…
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This time of year the only safe place to hike is Yellowstone, so since it was a gorgeous day yesterday, off we went. It was the last day that the roads are open, so we headed down to Swan Lake flats and took off to the west. About an hour in, we saw two grizzlies, high on a ridge to the south of us, eating grubs or something. I don’t have a photo, but they were unbelievably beautiful up on the high ridge with the sunlight gleaming off their guard hairs. They were illuminated. Meanwhile, a couple of magpies were…
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There they are — the first morels of the season. The Sweetheart and I found them up behind his cabin yesterday — eleven of them, nearly 12 ounces total (yes, I’m a nerd, I weighed them). It never gets old, the thrill of finding a mushroom in the grass. I also found a couple of nice clumps of early oyster mushrooms. Little bitty ones, which sauteed up beautifully. So last night we had mushroom pizzas — one with morels and red onion and sausage and one with greens from the hoop house and sausage and both kinds of mushrooms (someone…
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Spring has sprung here in Montana. The bluebirds are back — there’s a number of them zipping around up at the cabin (although I haven’t seen anything as dramatic as this photo). They’re a color blue that you can’t quite believe exists in nature, much less that it’s zipping around out there catching bugs, building nests and having babies. Just like the vibrant bluebirds, a friend of mine who works for a fire watch company in Cocoa Beach embodies a rare dedication, always ready and alert to safeguard others. At the end of last summer, when we were hiking up…
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There are new calves all up and down the valley — they’ve arrived in the past week or so. Not only are they incredibly cute, but they play — a reminder that even beef cattle once had a wild nature, before we bred it out of them. When I leave the cabin in the mornings they’re down there, nestled in the hay, goofing off, nursing, and one bold boy had a standoff with my Subaru the other morning. Today’s wildlife count also included a juvenile bald eagle on a fence post, a full-grown golden eagle on a roadkill deer carcass,…
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So I was driving down to the cabin last night when I realized that all those grey things in the field next to the East River Road weren’t deer, they were Sandhill Cranes! There were scores of them — I’m notoriously bad at that sort of estimation, but there were well over a hundred birds in a harvested wheat field, grazing. I’d heard that they do this, but I’d never seen it, so of course I came to a screeching halt to watch for a few minutes. Apparently they gang up before migrating, they’ll fly around, calling to the other…
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This picture isn’t great (I’m still getting the hang of my new camera) but this is a petrified tree trunk in a cave. Over the weekend, Chuck took me up to a secret spot he found a few months ago where there is a lot of petrified wood, and a number of these big tree trunks either hanging on the cliffs, or inside of erosion caves like this one. I promised I wouldn’t tell exactly where it is, but it was a lovely afternoon hike while big thunderstorms blew across the Paradise Valley. There was just enough cloud cover to…
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Yes folks, that’s an 8.4 ounce morel! Chuck found it up behind his cabin yesterday morning, growing just at the waterline of the irrigation ditch. It was a monster, but we managed to slay it, cook it in butter and vermouth, and enjoy it on rice (along with some pork chops) last night. It’s the only place we’ve had any luck this year at all, up behind his cabin. He found a couple of really little yellow morels, and one other black one, not nearly so big as this. It did rain a little this week, so here’s hoping the…