Holiday elk

For Christmas
The Elk

Come walking

Our house guest

Sadie is visiting for a few days while her people are on a trip out of town. The crew started at dawn by waking up the elk. If you look up the road you can see the elk crossing. The elk were not thrilled about their early morning barking alarm clock. I'm pretty sure my neighbor on the other side of the road is even less thrilled. The elk like to eat the hay he puts out for his cattle.


Sadie and BB just play non stop.


Ginny tries to keep up best she can.

That's quite a bit of snowplow action she has there. We're lucky it's not a wet snow.


The whole crew got crazy.


All through the day.




Right up till sunset.

Why am I the only one who's exhausted after all of this? They should have slept like little doggie logs but I got my 5 am wake up licks as usual.

Snowshoe

Yesterday the sun was out in the afternoon. The snow was a sugary powder so I decided to take a little snowshoe walk out in the meadow.

Luverboy was the only one who wanted to come with me. He seemed to enjoy it.


The elk were there in the night. As you can see elk tracks in the snow are quite different than deer tracks. They sashay through the snow instead of dragging their hooves.


Here are a couple of elk sitzmarks where they spent the night.

These are tracks with an elk moving slightly faster. That's about an 8 foot stride.


Luverboy's stride is considerably shorter. He finally decided to catch up to me.

So that I could break trail for him.

Ginny looked like she'd been having her own brand of fun while we'd been out on our walk.

Wapiti

I was working in the barn in the late afternoon and I heard it- the first unmistakable sound of Fall. "Eeep, Eeep, Eeep." The Puli brothers went nuts. The corgis looked at me. After all what's the big deal? It's just our Winter Elk herd. What an absurd sound from such a huge graceful animal.



There they were- 100-150 Elk clearly annoyed that I'd put in new fence by the road. After stopping traffic in both directions they trotted through the sage down down past the house and down to the gulley. After stopping to graze in my neighbors well irrigated field they hopped the next series of fences and crossed the road Westward. I'll probably see them down by the River today. They like to settle in on the golf course with the Canadian Geese.

Hunting season is here and they know where they can hang out.