Surprise Finds

Very much related to treasures are the things you see out in the woods that are a total surprise. We can split hairs over the difference between a treasure and a surprise find over a campfire one day.

One such surprise find happened to me in the summer of 2022. I was scouting for elk in some flat, mostly open habitat. At first glance, you would call it “antelope country” because of how open it was…and the fact that you saw antelope all over it.

The elk loved it because it had thick pockets of trees that provided ample shade and cover and it had plenty of tanks and water holes.

So while this is not quite as flat and open as the one in this outstanding piece of cinema, you would not consider it “rocky mountain” type country.

I jumped a good sized herd of elk while checking one of the water tanks out there in the flats. The summer rains had not hit real hard yet, so that tank wasn’t much more than a puddle. I walked around the tank to get a feel for how much traffic it was getting and saw plenty of elk and antelope tracks, as well as some hoof print sizes that fell in between those two. Deer maybe?

I got back to the Jeep and puttered around for a minute getting a snack and some water. I looked back toward the tank and it took a solid 10 seconds for my brain to register what I was looking at.

A little Google searching after getting home revealed that a some Rocky Mountain Bighorn had been transplanted into a rugged canyon not terribly far from this spot.

Still a surprise to see them in that kind of country, and another good reason to keep heading out into the woods!