Running With Bulls

Daisy always has her eyes and nose tuned for elk:

Last week, on a ride at about 9000 feet, she lucked into a bachelor herd.  If you click on the photo below, you'll see her in the group to the right: 

Notice that she's not really chasing them, she's running with them, and they don't seem to mind.  Below is an enlargement of the group of elk on the right hand side of the above photo. I have labeled Daisy in red, where she's running in second place.)

She seems to think it's okay to join in the fun, just as she would when running beside our horses.

Look at all the bull antlers!  Nice, don't you agree?

At the top of the hill, the entire group stopped to look back at us:

We also saw a herd of mommas and babies on the same ride, but they didn't stay around long enough for a photo op. 

Missing Meadow

Beautiful, sunny day today. The temp was about 60 in Roosevelt, and in the low 40’s up Paradise Park Road, which was our destination for today’s ride.
We started about a mile and a half up the road from the forest service boundary, turning onto a two track that had a convenient pull out for parking the trailer, located at about 8400 feet. From there, we trotted and loped up the road another couple of miles and 1200 feet. Again, very little traffic on the road.
At 9500 feet, small patches of snow lay in the trees, and the road was wet. We took a turn to the right on a jeep road that had puddles, pools and even running water in places from snowmelt. We sogged and bogged on through that for a couple of miles, surrounded by a thick lodgepole forest. We got off the road and tried to find our way through the trees to a meadow area Steve had seen on Google Earth, but we never did locate it, and finally tired of dodging tree branches.
On the way down, I noticed that the aspen leaves were absent until we reached 9200 feet, at which point they were small and new. Two hundred feet lower, and the leaves were fully out and mature.

We paused to take pictures in a pretty meadow of buttercups and dandelions. Just below our trailhead, we saw yellow balsam root flowers out in force. The ride down was windy and a little cool. We were glad to have our handy, all-purpose Aussie dusters.
The total ride was about 8 miles, 1200 feet, in 3 hours.
Conclusion: Not a route we would do again. We’ll try to reach Mosby Park and Mosby Sink by another route on another day.

Middle to Mosby Mountain Loop

Today we started from the Paradise Park road’s Middle Mountain trailhead, intending to reach the top of Middle Mountain and search for a trail leading to Mosby Mountain. On top of Middle Mountain, the snow was gone and spring beauties were in bloom. We saw the usual large elk herd melting into the forest. Daisy smelled them but couldn't tell which way they'd went. She ran around sniffing the ground for awhile with little success. We also saw one doe in the woods. Up top, it was windy and chilly, even with the temperature probably in the fifties.


We found a trail going toward Mosby, but after following it for perhaps a mile, it petered out in a dense lodgepole forest that had suffered intense blowdown and was a mass of crisscrossed fallen logs. We tried two routes that appeared to be elk trails, but the logs made the going tough.
Giving up, we turned around and headed out of the forest back toward Middle Mountain. However, Steve took a look at his GPS and map, and realized we’d been within half a mile of a road on Mosby Mountain when we’d quit. So, back we went.
This time, we tried yet another elk trail. We led the horses over numerous logs, through the dense trees and blowdown. Finally, we did get through, ending up where Mosby Creek crosses the Mosby Mountain road, a place we recognized from a ride up that road last weekend.
That last trip, we’d encountered a lot of snow. All of that was gone now. The road had plenty of water pools on it, but was plenty passable, and not too slippery. We continued down that road to our trailer without incident. The total ride was seven miles, 1200 feet elevation, done in about 3 hours.
Moral: Persistence pays dividends.