A day of wildlife and wild K!

Our clearing has been hopping with animal activity during daylight hours for the past couple of days. A bobcat sauntered through unnoticed at about noon today. Our wildlife camera snapped a photo.

A coyote declared our clearing as her own.

K and I hiked this morning. She endured my sunrise photos with great patience... waiting for me to let her RUN!

K's golden eye in the sunrise light.

Please, please, can I run now?

She started with a leap!

As we hiked up higher, the forest was a world of light shafts and shadows.

K just kept jumping and running - she's so thrilled to be BACK in her forest. Notice in the second photo that K chose to land on her "bad" paw! That's a great sign.

She maneuvered on nimble feet through a dense aspen forest.

After our hike, I headed out on the snow bike, encountering weird conditions. On this trail, the wind had whipped away most of the snow but compact drifts had accumulated in the dips in the trail. They were cement-like drifts that stopped me in my tracks as I climbed toward a ridgeline with beautiful views.

I made it... and was rewarded with this mountain view!

I dropped over to the other side of the ridge where winter prevailed. Six inches of unbroken snow covered the trail. I rode along on a pristine trail making "first tracks" until I came upon these stunning mountain lion tracks. Our forest's king had recently surveyed his domain. These are humongous tracks. My handwarmer is 3.5" long and looks dwarfed by the lion paw.

At times, the mountain lion walked fast, using a gait where each hind paw overstepped the track of the front paw on the same side.

Then, I came upon an odd scene that I couldn't interpret. The lion had just climbed up a steep embankment to the trail. At the point where he joined the trail, a big area was trampled, snow was melted, and a small area was scraped down to dirt. Then, the lion left this spot and ambled slowly away. You can see his tracks leaving the trampled oval and marching upward in the photo.

Going in the opposite direction, I saw the tracks of a deer taking huge leaping strides. I wonder if the lion and deer met at this point, and the deer escaped unscathed.

Regardless, I love finding fascinating tracks like these. I could tell that the lion tracks were not fresh so I wasn't worried that the animal was right behind me.

We ended our day with a sunset hike. R and K both focused on something to the west.

And the color faded from the sky to end another winter day.

Wild sunrise, wild animals, and wild bike ride

It's becoming our tradition - K and I started the day by hiking up to see the sun rise. Today, we were a tiny bit late, and the sun didn't wait for us.

Another glorious start to a winter day...

After I took K's photo, I looked back to the east and the picture had changed dramatically in the blink of an eye - wild black clouds drifted in front of the sun.

After lingering to enjoy the sunrise, we started hiking upward, through a maze of boulders and pine trees all surrounded by snow. K seemed distracted. Something in the forest that I couldn't perceive had her attention.

When I feel that K or R is focused on something other than me, I always stop and play the eye contact game. Here, K fixed her mesmerizing eyes on me but her ears were pinned back as she monitored sounds behind her.

Within about 50 yards, I discovered what had K's attention. Last night, a mountain lion had traversed the broken meadow and forest yet again.

A closeup of one track showed it to be a smallish mountain lion, again. The size looks about the same as the tracks that I found two days ago and two weeks ago. I'm beginning to think that we have a female mountain lion who has young kittens stashed in our area. Females with kittens hunt a small area with fiendish intensity rather than cruising a huge area of up to 500 square miles like a male mountain lion normally does. That scenario would explain why I'm seeing these smallish tracks on such a regular basis. In the photo below, my chemical handwarmer is in the photo for scale and is 3.5" long.

As we tracked the cat, I discovered one spot that she's passed in each of her recent excursions through our forest. Yes, you guessed correctly - there is now a wildlife camera posted at that spot - it's a saddle on a small ridge where the lion likes to cross the ridge. I hope to get her photo to honor the Year of the Mountain Lion.

Ann from Zoolatry kindly made a fabulous badge denoting the Year of the Mountain Lion. It's in the upper right corner of my sidebar and is free to be copied if you so wish. Thank you for sharing your amazing talents, Ann!

I saw that the lion's tracks headed down a steep hillside and would have taken us on a much longer journey than I'd planned. So, we left the lion's trail and started heading toward home. Once we left the tracks, K relaxed.

And, she enjoyed her ability to gallop through the snow.

I left K at home at the end of our hike, and I headed out on my snowbike. I haven't mentioned it for the past couple of days because the snowbiking has been frustrating, to put it mildly. Ferocious winds hurled our snow into small drifts with a cement-like tough layer on top - a nearly impossible snowbiking situation. I repeatedly got stuck in the cement, unable to pedal strongly enough to break the windpacked snow. The snow was so tough that it held my bike upright all by itself.

Today was different. I'm not sure why - but I could ride again. I pedaled nimbly up to Hug Hill where the skies beamed deep blue. Almost all the snow had been blown off of the peak and eastward toward Kansas.

As I descended via a meadow, I heard the thundering of hooves and looked to the south to see a huge elk herd. As soon as I stopped moving, the elk stopped galloping downhill. Almost all eyes were on me.

As I took photos, the herd started oozing forward again, spreading out into a long line with a few stragglers grazing absent-mindedly behind the moving herd.

The herd constantly moves, never grazing in one meadow for more than a couple of days in a row. An elder female leads the herd from one grazing site to another.

I had an extraordinarily hard ride, encountering sections of deep snow and fierce winds. But then, when I was ready to fall over from exhaustion, I'd hit a section like this one - a beautiful ribbon of trail stretching out westward, reaching for the Divide.

So often, the small battles that I fight in a mountain bike ride mimic real life. If I can slog through the tough parts and keep an optimistic spirit, I usually am rewarded with gleeful riding later. Such is life.

Action from sunrise to sunset

Although I yearn for more daylight and cheer each extra minute that we gain, I also love being out in the forest for both sunrise and sunset in one day. As K and I hiked upward early this morning, glow of the sun below the horizon set the treetops ablaze.

K led the way as we climbed out of a dark low meadow and onto a sun-bathed high plateau.

She stood stock still sampling the scents in the air.

The sun had just peeked over the rocky pinnacles to our east.

The higher mountains glowed in the sun's rising light.

K seemed to say "the future's so bright that I gotta wear shades"!

Ah, after days of stormy weather, my chocolate girl and I reveled in the sunshine.

 Alas, a ceiling of clouds still sat above the horizon. Soon, the sun disappeared behind them.

K and I hiked onward, investigating the tracks of a mountain lion who passed through our forest early on New Year's morning. I wonder if it was the same cat as I tracked a couple of weeks ago. She used a slightly different route but her paw size and shape matched the tracks of two weeks ago. Again, I barely missed getting any photos of the lion with my remote motion-activated cameras. I'm sure that my luck will change soon.

When we left the lion's tracks, I released K to run. Whew, did she ever run! We are in the only fun part of the paw ordeal where I can see K getting stronger every day.

We kept exploring - the snow can reveal new animal routes to me - wildlife camera placement possibilities - so we ranged far and wide looking for animal tracks. The animals had finally ventured out after days of extremely bitter cold and high winds. Deer had meandered inside aspen groves, bobcats had marched from one boulder outcropping to another, coyotes had visited the expansive meadows to hunt rodents, and a solitary mountain lion had cruised our neck of the woods, like a shark hunting for dinner.

When I nearly missed a wildlife sign, my faithful K pointed it out to me. I'm ecstatic that we're a team in the forest again!

At the end of our hike, we arrived home to find a content R snoozing in the sunshine on the dog bed by the roaring fire. R had run, eaten, and now was sound asleep in the sun. What more could a Labrador want?

During the day, a coyote visited our clearing. He was extraordinarily wary, watching and listening for any sign of danger.

His orange highlights glowed in the sunshine. It's been a tough few days for our wildlife. I'm sure that he welcomed the warmer and calmer weather even more than we did.

Finally, our foursome took a sunset hike to Hug Hill, seeing the brilliant colors of the setting sun in the eggshell blue sky.

I'm feeling as content and sleepy as R was, snoozing in front of the fire. It was a wonderful start to 2011.

Joy and tenacity for 2011

From paw surgery in September, another surgery in November, and short walks clomping along on a cast every morning for months...

... to a spontaneous and rambunctious expression of joy and athletic grace this morning.

May we all find that kind of joy in our lives in 2011.

May we be bathed in the glory and warmth of the rising sun...

...until our fur glows red and toasty warm.

And, may we find the tenacity and resilience of our largest predator, the mountain lion - my icon for 2011.

 

Happy New Year.