Well the last week’s weather wasn’t too terrible. It was just cold and windy which isn’t too bad unless on a 4-wheeler. Then it’s not too much fun. Well it’s not too much fun driving a few miles on one at 30 miles an hour. While driving fence it’s not too bad and we are done with the fence. We still have another two mile section to take down but it’s all still standing up strait now.
We are finishing up our Sage grouse lek counts in our little basin here we only have a handful left to do. Then we have some searches to do for new leks. We are heading up to Blue Mountain in the morning at 3:30am to get to the few leks that we can and do a few searches. Our boss did a few flights over that area Thursday and Friday and he said it looks like it’s still the middle of winter up there and there are still 5 to 6 foot of snow up in the leking area. The National Park Service’s paved road is still buried under snow in places and they aren’t opening it till possibly next month. So we are going tomorrow to get what we can then we’ll be done up there. We did drive right up in the middle of a lek this last week and I think I got some really good pictures!
We did some White Tailed Prairie Dog searches this week but it’s still pretty cold and in most places we are searching for them they aren’t up yet. So we’re hoping to get some more done next week since the weather has been and looks pretty bad this week. We did finally see our first coyote since we have been here. We have seen lots of sign but they are very heavily hunted because of all the sheep that are in the area. So they have learned to stay pretty hidden. I did see a few pretty nice elk bulls this last week too. I found out there are about 1500 elk in our area right now getting ready to migrate to the mountains.
We started counting Columbian Sharp Tailed Grouse this last Friday. They are pretty crazy birds. The males kind of look like an airplane on the ground when displaying and they run around all over really fast and then some fly over here and then fly back. All this makes them pretty tough to count. Plus they flush off the lek very easy. We did find a new lek the day before we started our lek counts on them which is pretty cool because it is in an area that they have not previously been. Dustin and I split up to cover more leks and he took the 4-wheeler. I finished all my lek counts and started back to where I dropped him off. I hooked up the trailer and waited for about 20 mins and then was thinking o should go look for him. But he was able to reach me on the radio and the 4-wheeler died on him so I drove the 15 mins to where I was closer to him since it was still pretty muddy back there but we didn’t have to push it too far. And now that is in the shop for who knows how long.
We washed the Explorer on Friday as well. We joked as we were doing it that we were washing away all the mud that was holding it together. Then on the way home it started shimmying really bad so I guess it wasn’t much of a joke! All the mud we had collected put our tires way off balance and we got that fixed today.
Got a call from Brian, our boss, on Sunday night. He said we get a truck in 3 weeks but we need to go to Denver to pick it up on Monday. So Monday morning we did our counts and of course it was snowing… drove to Meeker picked up the boss’s truck drove the four and a half hours to Denver, picked up the truck, and drove back. It was a log drive we ended up having a 14 hour day Monday. But all in all it wasn’t too bad. It will be nice when we have the truck though. It is a 2002 Dodge Ram 2500 with a nice big bed to fix our 4-wheeler so we don’t have to haul it on the trailer any more.
Today was just a bad day it rained most of yesterday afternoon, rained all night and snowed in the morning. So even the main good dirt roads were terrible…. We had to change our plans for today and we weren’t able to get much done since we couldn’t drive our explorer off the main road. Tomorrow may not be much fun either we had a nice little snow/rain/hail/thunder storm roll through here not too long ago with 45 mph winds. And the rest of the week looks about the same. So it’s probably a good thing we had a 14 hr day on Monday. Oh well got to love the weather reminds me of Cheyenne.
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