Bighorn!

Because Columbus Day is still a holiday in MT, Richard had the day off to do a little reconnaissance of the surrounding area in advance of Kristen's arrival in a couple of weeks.

The Pintler Scenic Route is aptly named, and from Anaconda passes by the Discovery ski area and Georgetown Lake, where Richard saw a group of young bald eagles play "keep away the corpse" with a coot that one of them had hunted. They were also being intermittently mobbed by hundreds of irritated ravens. The eagles would snatch the coot out of the water, then engage in aerial dogfights , ultimately dropping it from a great height, in what appeared almost like a game. Other bird sightings included a pileated woodpecker and a pair of red breasted merganser.

Onward then to Rock Creek, just outside Missoula, where the gorgeous Sapphire Mountain Range rises. A few miles into the park, Richard decided to take a "Bighorn viewing trail", but with rather modest expectations. You see, the Bignorn Sheep is the last of the North American megafauna to elude us, in spite of years of looking.

The trail ran along a ridge over the valley pictured above. About a mile in, a group of about a dozen white-rumped ungulates moved briskly through the valley. At first, they looked like a group of young caribou. But it didn't to take long to realize that they were, in fact, a group of bighorn ewes and calves. None of them had the characteristic curved horns of the adult ram, but watching them leap easily over a 5 foot cattle fence and disappear back into the hillside was still a thrill.

The trail continued back deeper into the hills along a ravine, but a couple of miles in some ominous bones and bear scat stared to appear, so Richard turned back just above Mormon Spring.

Hiking back along the same ridge above the valley where they were earlier, these two young bighorn were seen doing the more classical rock hopping for which the species is known. It truly is remarkable the ease with which they scramble up sheer cliff sides.