Winter in the Spring

 Spring finally decides to arrive on the plains and what do we do? We head back into winter for a final week of back-country skiing in some of the deepest, finest snow I have ever seen!

 Cooke City is only 34 miles from our house as the crow flies. In the winter it takes us about 2 1/2 hours to get there - assuming we even can - because of the Beartooth Mountains between us. Last Monday we left here with the snowmobile trailer in tow and headed up and over Chief Joseph Highway (above) to Pilot Creek Trailhead. There we parked our vehicle and switched to snow machines for the 9 mile ride over closed highways to Cooke City where we would meet the rest of our party.

The snow pack just got deeper and deeper as we neared Cooke. The snowmobile track "high pointing" this house as we neared town gives you an idea of the snow depth as does the shot below looking down main street back toward Highway 212. 

 From Cooke we got back on our machines for the 6 mile ride to the wilderness boundary at which point we boot-packed up to the Mt. Zimmer yurt at 9460'. This was to be our home for the next five days.

The yurt holds six people, barely, but two of our group had sustained injuries over the previous few weeks and so we had a comfortable foursome in the small space.

 This is our second year making this trip. We thought last year's snow pack was big but it didn't touch what we saw this time around. The 10' walls of the canvas structure were buried, necessitating a pretty good hike down snow steps to enter.

Nor was our weather anything like last year's big sunny days. We received about 18" of new snow while we were there and most days were cloudy and gray. While that meant the photography was somewhat challenged, it made for some absolutely amazing skiing.

 Inside the yurt is a wood stove for heat and melting snow for water. A three burner propane stove means meals are easily prepared.

There are three sets of bunk beds around the outer wall. Keeping organized is a must.

One of the biggest challenges of this year's visit was the trip to the outhouse. The 10' structure was buried under another five feet or so of snow, making the journey to the facility a daunting task!

Thanks to Ken for the two shots in which I appear!

Bighorn Canyon

 Living near the Beartooth Mountains is wonderful but it does tend to spoil us. Bighorn Canyon is only an hour or so to our east, but we have ignored the area up until now. So I was thrilled when my photography group, Shoot Like A Woman, decided to spend a day in the canyon last weekend.

 The goal was to photograph the area's wild horses but they remained elusive for most of the day. We did catch sight of one lone bachelor late in the afternoon but he was at a considerable distance from the road.

Not only is the canyon absolutely beautiful, it has a number of areas of historical significance. We spent a little time at the Ewing-Snell Ranch poking around amongst the old buildings and machinery.

 The colors of the landscape were magnificent, even on a gray March day.

We were lucky enough to see one bighorn ram near Barry's Landing.

Animal Cruelty?

 I know it is dangerous to anthropomorphize, but it was almost impossible to watch this scenario play out and not make comparisons to a gang of humans playing the"knockout game" with an unsuspecting victim. I saw this drama take place on Lake McConaughy on our way home from Nebraska.

WARNING: There are some people who will have extreme empathy with the snow goose in this post. I recommend you go no further.

 I noticed the large gathering of bald eagles when we pulled up to the lookout point. On our first trip through most of the baldies were spread out over the lake so I knew that something unusual was taking place. It was a long way off but I was able to follow what was happening through my 400mm lens.

The eagles were taking turns flying in and "punching" the snow goose as they landed. After they took their turn they would often get up and fly away, leading me to believe they were making a sport of the exercise rather than looking for a meal.

After each hit the goose would hang his head and then gradually come back to standing until the next eagle dealt him a blow.

 Over the course of the ten minutes or so I watched I saw at least 20 eagles rotate through the site. The one constant individual in all this was the immature eagle you see directly in front of the snow goose. Maybe the bigger birds were conducting a training session for the youngster on how to capture a goose meal.

I was astonished to see the snow goose get up and fly away after taking multiple hits over 10-15 minutes. But as you can see in this last photo, the immature and an adult eagle were in hot pursuit.

It is probably a good thing that my card registered full at that moment as the ending was not a happy one for the poor goose.

The Main Event

 The goal of our trip to Nebraska was to see sandhill cranes and see them we did! It is almost impossible to describe the overwhelming sight and sound of so many birds in one place. It was everything I hoped for and more.

During the day the big birds spent most of their time in the corn fields cleaning up leftovers from the harvest. It seemed like every field we saw had hundreds of cranes busy fueling up for the trip north. And those fields that didn't have cranes had snow geese by the thousands.

 But the real treat of the trip was the ability to spend time two evenings and one morning in a blind on the Platte River watching the cranes and the geese come in to settle on the sandbars. The only problem was that although the sights were amazing, the photography was challenged, at best. By the time the birds arrived the sky was usually so dark that I was shooting wide open at 3200 ISO and still getting blurry shots.

 The first evening we were in the blind we had one of the most intense, colorful sunsets I have ever seen in my life. There was no need to saturate any of these images - what you see is what I saw!

 The cranes waited until the last light to start making their way to the sandbars in front of the blind. It had been a beautiful day and I think they knew that was about to change. The following day was cold, wet and windy; not much fun for flying.

This shot shows the cranes darkening the sky as they come in to land. The first evening I ended up with almost no usable shots of cranes from the blind but it was still worth the time and effort to witness the spectacle.

 The photo above is from the second evening. A few cranes came in a little earlier and I was able to get some shots of them settling in for the night.

My favorite shots from the trip are of cranes in flight. These last few were all taken on the cold second day. The light was grey but the birds were beautiful!

Goosed!

The goal of our recent trip to Nebraska was to view migrating sandhill cranes. We were thrilled to see and hear thousands of the large birds but we were also amazed by the sighting of what was  almost certainly more than a million geese. 

We started seeing large numbers of geese overhead almost as soon as the interstate began following the Platte River in Nebraska. The streams looked like undulating lines of skywriting overhead that went on for mile after mile after mile. At first we assumed the birds were Canada Geese but a closer look showed that they were primarily Snow Geese. Over the course of the next five days we saw some Canadas and a few White Fronts but the overwhelming majority of birds were the white and black Snow Geese.

 The birds tended to travel or feed in the corn fields with the sandhill cranes during the day and then bunk in to small lakes or on the sand bars in the Platte River during the nighttime hours.

 There were times when the sky was totally black with snow geese. The photo above looks like an insect hatch. It is pretty amazing to think that each one of those specks is a 5-6 pound bird!

The two color variations of snow geese can be seen in this last photo.

Eagle Mania

For years Ken and I have been saying we wanted to take a trip to Nebraska's Platte River during the annual migration of the sandhill cranes. This year our schedule finally lined up and we headed for Grand Island last Sunday. 

It is a twelve to thirteen hour drive from here to our destination so we decided to do it in two days. The first night we stayed in Kimball, NE, which meant we had time to spare on day two in order to arrive at  Grand Island when we needed to that afternoon. We got up early and headed east, experiencing the amazing prairie sunrise pictured here. 

We knew nothing about the land we were in other than the information we garnered from a couple of brochures picked up at the hotel the previous evening. Based on those, we decided to exit the interstate at Ogallala and drive up to Lakes McConughy and Ogallala to see if we could spot any bald eagles. 

While the town of Ogallala seemed clean and friendly, we discovered that most people regard the lakes as a summer destination and knew little about eagle watching areas. So we drove on up the 7 miles to the dam and were happy to find a large information center. Unfortunately the person there told us we were probably too late as she had been told the eagles had already dispersed for the year. We decided to go see for ourselves and am I glad we did! She was correct that the eagles have left from Lake Ogallala but it seems they just went over the hill to the much larger Lake McConaughy. 

 In this photo you can see ten bald eagles. At one time I had close to fifty in my sights, all perched on the frozen lake.

 What the eagles were looking for, of course, was duck dinner. Below the dam and around open water the mergansers were plentiful.

We were so impressed by the sights on the Lake that we decided to stop in on our way home as well. Over the next few days I will cover the visit to Grand Island as well as some of the amazing experiences witnessed on our return visit to Lake McConaughy.