Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 13

Sunday June 8 

We didn’t get up especially early but were still on the road by 9am or so. Up this far north, it’s completely light outside by 4:30 in the morning. Since I like to sleep with the window shades up so that that sunrise will help me wake up, this really messes with my sleepitude. However, I seem to have no problem checking the clock and falling back to sleep immediately. 

We are on mountain daylight time too, which adds to the sleep disruption.

We planned to drive to the Elkhorn Ranch Unit of the park, which is the spot just north of the south unit where Theodore Roosevelt had his ranch. We were warned that there was nothing to see there other than a few foundation stones, but we still thought there’d be a better chance of seeing wildlife on that drive than on the more visited parts of the park.

It was a nice drive through rolling rangeland. We crossed innumerable cattle guards and had to drive really slowly from time to time to keep from running into the mom cows and babies on the road. But no other animals or birds appeared, other than a Lazuli Bunting and an Ovenbird. According to Merlin on that latter—it didn’t sound like any Ovenbird I ever heard back east. I heard and saw a pair of them in Massachusetts and heard one while hiking in Kentucky at Land Between the Lakes. Their songs were both different from each other, and this one’s was a whole lot different from either. That would be an interesting thing to look into.

When we got to the ranch,  we were able to take Molly on a three-quarter mile trail back from the parking lot to the riverside where the foundation stones were. Probably technically she wasn’t supposed to be on the “trail”, but the signage called it a “walk” and there were no people around anywhere other than a single red truck that had been parked at the primitive campground.

  

Of course after we walked out and were were headed back, we met the two people from the red truck. They just smiled and said hi. And after that we met a whole group of people, walking no fewer than five dogs.  So if we flaunted the rules, so be it.

The homesite is indeed a once-beautiful place. You can still see the falling down ruins of the cottonwood trees they planted around the ranch houses, according to the pictures. It would have been a lovely place to get some solitude, and there were big rock formations off in the distance to give you a sense of space. We could see the river on our walk but you couldn’t see it from the homesite; possibly you could once upon a time when all the brush wasn’t grown up and hiding it all.  I suspect it was a much more open, parklike environment before the hundred-fifty years of fire suppression let all the cedar and brushy plants move in.

This is one instance where I think preserving the ranch in its original state, or restoring it as much as possible, would have been preferable to tearing it down and leaving it wild.  Because mankind has already changed the environment irrevocably, with fire suppression, elimination of buffalo and large predators, and bringing in invasive plants and insects.  It will never go back to what it was, but we could at least try to put it close to that.

After that drive we went on back to the south unit to finish the 2-hour scenic drive we’d started on the day before. We saw bison again and lots of prairie dogs, but little else except people. It wasn’t super crowded, not like Yellowstone or Arches.  All the parking lots had spaces. But there were enough people to keep the animals scared away.

Except the bison.  They just sat out in the middle of the dog towns and all around. And a lovely little herd of horses adorned one  of the hillsides—wish I’d gotten a picture of them.

 

  

All day long the wind was murderous. We knew it was going to be bad—that was part of the reason for choosing the long drive instead of the hikes I wanted to do. But it was worse than bad—25-35 mph with gusts up to 50 mph, according to the weather report.  It seemed worse than that—at one point we walked up to a high overlook and were nearly blown off our feet. It was only a five-minute walk or less, but any time I had only one foot on the ground, I felt unsteady enough to stagger with the wind gusts.  Pretty much the most exhausting 5-minute walk I ever had.

But it was a nice drive.  Sadly, when we returned home expecting the wind to stop blowing enough that we could grill steak/fish outside, it had not even slackened. The weather forecast said eight p.m. might start to see a decrease. When I walked Molly for her evening stroll (up and down the campground), at about 7:30 or 8:00, it was still blowing but beginning to drop off slightly.

What a wild day.