Cougar Canyon and the 21 Tick Salute
Outside of our small valley is Alder Gulch, several hundred yards south of our home and a step back into time and wilderness. Gold panning is popular in the summer, and the remains of iron equipment and mine shafts left from an earlier time are still littering the floor and the sides of the limestone cliffs. There's cougar sign in Alder Gulch too. Weve had hounds baying behind the house chasing a Cougar, though its rare. That one got away; he jumped to a ledge on the north side of the mountain and fooled the dogs. Several cried at the edge of the cliff where theyd last smelled and seen the big cat, and one or two other dogs paced in the stream below the rocks trying to pick up the scent again. When you go into Alder Gulch, you leave the home of men and youre in the home of the cougar. There are tracks, the usual scat markings, and an occasional sighting. No trouble yet in the gulch, though a big female was once shot because she kept hanging out near the school house and watching the children play. Not a good thing to do for a molestor or a Cougar, if you dangle about on tree limbs over the playground and study the children all day...
Its Spring before the bud, and the ground is saturated with water from snow melt and unsettled. The Robins are here but the main food supply hasnt shown yet, so everything is scrambling for a bite to eat. Deer keep coming into my yard, because the edible plants havent restarted yet from the Winter. Theyve pieces missing from their hides because of ticks, ugly bare patches showing raw skin. You wouldnt want to eat one this time of year. At least in the Fall, though theyve still ticks, theyve some meat on them and the fur is replenished. Early Spring is hard on wildlife. Wheres the food?
The boys and I took a trail through the Gulch one Saturday afternoon, leaving it behind and heading towards Saddle Butte. We tried to skirt around the border of the Grazing Association land, though I dont suppose our trespass would have made much difference to them. I didnt want the bored security guard Ive seen parked down the flat drive up to check us out. We were in these woods precisely because we were tired of being checked out.
The trail goes over the saddle dividing the gulch from the other hills in the range, and it was a limestone cliff- faced brace of hills we wanted to explore. Very few come here. The trail goes into the flats and there are no walk ways for people used to parks. A occasional hunter wanders in, but hes conscious of the long drag back to the wherever he parked his truck should he bag a head of game, and this keeps their numbers few. I don't rightly know if these be hills or mountains. The flats are roughly 4000 feet above sea level. The mountains rise above this to no more than 5550 feet. We're approximately 100 miles from the Canadian border, and commonly have snow through spring. The ground is rough, the rise steep.
Carter found some more wild onions along the way, just starting to send their green shoots out towards the light. The earth was warm, warmer perhaps than the 60 degree air. I like early Spring. Theres finally a place for the word inchoate, the Spring that's about to become.
Great, if were lost we can have onion breath, I told Carter. He smiled up at me. You are a naturalist, Son. You might think of doing that someday. He was always noticing the wild plants, the small insects and the tiny events most kids kept sight of as important, that most adults have long dismissed and no longer choose to see. We were always looking for bits of agate or fossil, anything good enough to drag home. The house was filled with rocks. More kept coming. There was a constant flow, the spill-over into the garden outside or in decorative displays around the property.
I imagine when we leave the valley for good the new owner will either be delighted by the rock gardens the property or irritated he has to haul them away.
We only wore sweatshirts. Very unusual for us to take that chance, as weather in the Rocky Mountain west can change quickly to just plain bad, and carrying a coat is nearly mandatory. We did have three nut-type health bars, a small amount of water, tissue paper, two HI khukuries and a SW 4" 41 mag. Each of my oldest two sons have their own khuk, though they can usually only carry them when they're with me. A little boy in the woods hammering on a fallen tree with a khukuri is not a sight to be taken in without a adult present. They are learning. During a hike we often stop for a chopping break. They whack away at the wood furiously. They really get a kick out of it. No limb is safe. As often as most will pause for their breath or water mine will demand to assail some dead tree. You hear the thunk whack thunk sound going through the woods....I wonder what the woodpeckers think? The Cougar hears; it is said when you enter the Cougar woods though you will see no cat you will be observed much of the time. I believe it. Many times I've crossed my path again to find fresh cat urine across the trail.
Carter has a 16" AK type and Trav was carrying his mother's small sirupate, a 12"
He'll be getting a longer model soon, but needs a little more maturity. It'll come. When it's time, and we have that..
During a previous hike Carter and I found a hidden grove of trees, in the gap between two hill formations. The mountains have limestone heads, usually with cliffs and caves. I've never seen so many caves. The Little Rocky Mountains are full of caves. You could not hope to explore them all in a lifetime. It was between two high rocky formations that this nugget of wilderness lay, and we were eager to find a way down into it. Not many would know it existed, a guarentee of adventure for boys and their father.
We'd observed the gap did not open upon the valley, but ended with an abrupt drop of 30 or 40 feet. You wouldn't find this place walking by. You had to climb up, over and in.
And it was bound to have cougar sign. It did. The first thing you notice as you go are several deer skeletons picked clean. Skeletons lead the way.
We climbed the northern side of the gap, and making it onto the shoulder, I knew we had to climb up and around the cliffs or down into the water drainage. The floor of the seam between these two ranges was blocked with old wood, uprooted trees, and boulders. It would be very diffcult and dangerous. I didn't want to carry a boy home who'd stepped through some wood and broken his ankle. But the cliffs above were trouble too. We saw one cave uphill, and there was another around the rocks where we sat. Any cat in these rocks could jump easily upon us, or certainly continue to watch without being seen. Being Spring, my concern was for a mother with kittens. She'd defend her young. And I'd have to defend mine. I realized the revolver on my right hip wasn't going to be pulled very quickly. The closed leaf holster was great for hiking and retaining the weapon, but not so good to bring it out fast. I could get hit and be down before I had a chance, but I couldn't walk with a gun in my hand either. We needed both arms and legs for this. We were barely holding onto the side of the slope. A roll down was possible, but I decided to go down to the drainage anyway.
.
"We might as well get it done, verify what's possible and what's not with this valley. If this is a way in I want to know. If we can't make it through we need to know. We can always climb back to the cliffs."
It was as bad as I feared. We crawled over 20 and 30 foot piles of brush and debris. I used Trav's khuk to clear a few limbs from my path. Every time I do not carry a khuk I regret it. There is often a use for it. You find a wood sample you like, or a limb has fallen across the trail or the road and the truck needs more clearence. We made a hundred yards this way, crawling, and came to the end. A steep cliff rose 30 feet above the ravine. We couldn't climb it. We had to hike back to the top of the ravine and travel along the summit until we saw an opening into the forest below.
There were caves everywhere. There were nine we counted on the way in. We were straddling a crack between two mountains, it was narrow at the bottom, and perhaps several hundred yards between peaks of limstone at the top. We climbed along the shoulder, and looked above us. There was a cave and you couldn't mistake the rank urine smell. It was occupied, though from Packrat or Cougar I did not know. Above that was another cave. There was nowhere to climb without having a cave at your back or side. You could not watch all the entrances at once.
"I think I should fire some warning shots." I told the boys. The sound of gunfire would send any observers of us running, and alert any others back in the fissure that we were coming and were dangerous. I hoped that was good. I didn't want to be attacked by a hysterical cat leaping out because they'd heard gunfire. That's possible, isn't it? I fired the 41 four times, carefully pausing them so they wouldn't be heard down in the flat below and mistaken for a three shot cry for help The kids removed their palms from their ears, and we continued up the slope. I removed the ear plugs I brought. Nothing came out of the caves, and at the top we found a place in the thick duff with large scat. Real large. I'd hate to run into the cat that made those; human size. It was fairly easy to hike down once we crested. The slope behind the rock face was gentle compared to what we'd hiked earlier. We lowered ourselves over a spine of rocks, traveling the vertical height of the mountain, with a cave below us. Fortunately, there was nothing in the cave.
At the bottom it was a kind of magic. No one had been here in who knows how long? There were large boulders of the type I call 'pre agate'; that is, orange and red, with streaks of amber that are not quite agate and have much of the glass like quality. These rocks were as big as refridgerators. We loved them. This type of rock can be used for arrow heads.
We looked, but there were no deer tracks of any kind. I'd never seen a area in the Little Rocky's without deer sign.
"We're in Cougar Canyon," Trav said.
"Yeah, Cougar heaven," Carter added.
After drinking some water and eating the candy like health bars, we followed the drainage downwards. There was more scat. Real big, even bigger than what we'd seen before, and it was in plain sight. 20 feet away you'd see another pile. The animal was really making a plain statement, a warning. We were close to a den.
We came to the end of the fissue, the crack between the two mountains, and found what we thought was the drop that stopped us earlier. We could see a way around now. There were two large caves above us, and against my better judgement, Carter persuaded me to go up there. The caves themselves had no animal life, but on the way I saw where a cat had run up the side of the mountain, dislodging the moss on the rock as he or she went. That was spooky. The spot was exactly forward of our position climbing into this place. The cat had been ahead and watched us. It was true. If you enter Cougar lands you are observed. The gunshots must have sent him scrambling.
The caves had grey color running around and above them on the rock face, looking like the past smoke of indian fires, which was likely. The caves with smoke were on the side of the divide that faced north, probably because of wind direction and smoke control, and shelter from the elements. We found no snarling cats, thank God. I listened very carefully. At one point I thought I heard the thud of a body on rock in the distance, but I couldnt be sure. Whatever had been there was gone now.
We thought we'd just walk down, but as soon as we dropped below the rock face, we came to another, longer drop. It was the original cliff face that'd stopped us. We'd been wrong- there was no way down. There was a alder tree laying on its side. We had two small khuks. I thought about stripping the tree of the branches, except for several hand and leg holds, and lowering it down the drop. We could climb the tree to home. But I didn't want to risk it. Every time I take a khuk out into the wilderness I marvel at their usefullness. There just isn't another tool like it. We could shave time off our return journey. It would be easy. "Yeah, we trimmed a downed tree and made a ladder, we got home fast." What a wonderful end to our hike, a great story. But I could see the potential for a accident too, and so with the sun starting to climb down into the sky, we climbed back out of the dark bottom and up onto the slope again. Carter found a wild tulip growing and stuck it in his pack. Just a bulb with a shoot. We'd add that to the wild onions we'd transplanted at home. My son noticing the small wild things again. I'm proud of him. He's almost 12, and if he still sees them now as he enters the teen years, he probably always would. (We planted that tulip in our garden outside the house, and the deer ate it almost as soon as we had it in the ground. Apparently Deer like tulip buds. Well, tulips have a safe place to grow under the eyes of the cougar in the little canyon. I made a note of that for the future; tulips might mean no deer, and if there were no deer brousing there was a reason.)
I fired the extra rounds I'd brought, saving six for the road. 4 or 5 shots later we climbed off the mountain and went home. We were glad to get past those caves, all of us visibly more relaxed once we did. A weight came off our shoulders. You have to be aware, you can't relax. Well, at least I can't. I don't know about you. Maybe you could hike with a Ipod. Bring a TV, what the hell...
These walks take away some of the worry my boys have gathered onto themselves in their short years, already learning the anxiety of our modern world. I'm afraid their father has also added to their troubles, wanting to please him and feeling they cannot always do that. I remember what it's like.
Burdens just seem to lift when you step out of yourself, your routine. We all need another world to go to. It's very unlikely a cougar would ever attack us, but it didn't hurt the adventure any to take precautions, to be aware of our surroundings. The tracks in the broken moss on in the rocks had been real, the cats were there.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
munk
Outside of our small valley is Alder Gulch, several hundred yards south of our home and a step back into time and wilderness. Gold panning is popular in the summer, and the remains of iron equipment and mine shafts left from an earlier time are still littering the floor and the sides of the limestone cliffs. There's cougar sign in Alder Gulch too. Weve had hounds baying behind the house chasing a Cougar, though its rare. That one got away; he jumped to a ledge on the north side of the mountain and fooled the dogs. Several cried at the edge of the cliff where theyd last smelled and seen the big cat, and one or two other dogs paced in the stream below the rocks trying to pick up the scent again. When you go into Alder Gulch, you leave the home of men and youre in the home of the cougar. There are tracks, the usual scat markings, and an occasional sighting. No trouble yet in the gulch, though a big female was once shot because she kept hanging out near the school house and watching the children play. Not a good thing to do for a molestor or a Cougar, if you dangle about on tree limbs over the playground and study the children all day...
Its Spring before the bud, and the ground is saturated with water from snow melt and unsettled. The Robins are here but the main food supply hasnt shown yet, so everything is scrambling for a bite to eat. Deer keep coming into my yard, because the edible plants havent restarted yet from the Winter. Theyve pieces missing from their hides because of ticks, ugly bare patches showing raw skin. You wouldnt want to eat one this time of year. At least in the Fall, though theyve still ticks, theyve some meat on them and the fur is replenished. Early Spring is hard on wildlife. Wheres the food?
The boys and I took a trail through the Gulch one Saturday afternoon, leaving it behind and heading towards Saddle Butte. We tried to skirt around the border of the Grazing Association land, though I dont suppose our trespass would have made much difference to them. I didnt want the bored security guard Ive seen parked down the flat drive up to check us out. We were in these woods precisely because we were tired of being checked out.
The trail goes over the saddle dividing the gulch from the other hills in the range, and it was a limestone cliff- faced brace of hills we wanted to explore. Very few come here. The trail goes into the flats and there are no walk ways for people used to parks. A occasional hunter wanders in, but hes conscious of the long drag back to the wherever he parked his truck should he bag a head of game, and this keeps their numbers few. I don't rightly know if these be hills or mountains. The flats are roughly 4000 feet above sea level. The mountains rise above this to no more than 5550 feet. We're approximately 100 miles from the Canadian border, and commonly have snow through spring. The ground is rough, the rise steep.
Carter found some more wild onions along the way, just starting to send their green shoots out towards the light. The earth was warm, warmer perhaps than the 60 degree air. I like early Spring. Theres finally a place for the word inchoate, the Spring that's about to become.
Great, if were lost we can have onion breath, I told Carter. He smiled up at me. You are a naturalist, Son. You might think of doing that someday. He was always noticing the wild plants, the small insects and the tiny events most kids kept sight of as important, that most adults have long dismissed and no longer choose to see. We were always looking for bits of agate or fossil, anything good enough to drag home. The house was filled with rocks. More kept coming. There was a constant flow, the spill-over into the garden outside or in decorative displays around the property.
I imagine when we leave the valley for good the new owner will either be delighted by the rock gardens the property or irritated he has to haul them away.
We only wore sweatshirts. Very unusual for us to take that chance, as weather in the Rocky Mountain west can change quickly to just plain bad, and carrying a coat is nearly mandatory. We did have three nut-type health bars, a small amount of water, tissue paper, two HI khukuries and a SW 4" 41 mag. Each of my oldest two sons have their own khuk, though they can usually only carry them when they're with me. A little boy in the woods hammering on a fallen tree with a khukuri is not a sight to be taken in without a adult present. They are learning. During a hike we often stop for a chopping break. They whack away at the wood furiously. They really get a kick out of it. No limb is safe. As often as most will pause for their breath or water mine will demand to assail some dead tree. You hear the thunk whack thunk sound going through the woods....I wonder what the woodpeckers think? The Cougar hears; it is said when you enter the Cougar woods though you will see no cat you will be observed much of the time. I believe it. Many times I've crossed my path again to find fresh cat urine across the trail.
Carter has a 16" AK type and Trav was carrying his mother's small sirupate, a 12"
He'll be getting a longer model soon, but needs a little more maturity. It'll come. When it's time, and we have that..
During a previous hike Carter and I found a hidden grove of trees, in the gap between two hill formations. The mountains have limestone heads, usually with cliffs and caves. I've never seen so many caves. The Little Rocky Mountains are full of caves. You could not hope to explore them all in a lifetime. It was between two high rocky formations that this nugget of wilderness lay, and we were eager to find a way down into it. Not many would know it existed, a guarentee of adventure for boys and their father.
We'd observed the gap did not open upon the valley, but ended with an abrupt drop of 30 or 40 feet. You wouldn't find this place walking by. You had to climb up, over and in.
And it was bound to have cougar sign. It did. The first thing you notice as you go are several deer skeletons picked clean. Skeletons lead the way.
We climbed the northern side of the gap, and making it onto the shoulder, I knew we had to climb up and around the cliffs or down into the water drainage. The floor of the seam between these two ranges was blocked with old wood, uprooted trees, and boulders. It would be very diffcult and dangerous. I didn't want to carry a boy home who'd stepped through some wood and broken his ankle. But the cliffs above were trouble too. We saw one cave uphill, and there was another around the rocks where we sat. Any cat in these rocks could jump easily upon us, or certainly continue to watch without being seen. Being Spring, my concern was for a mother with kittens. She'd defend her young. And I'd have to defend mine. I realized the revolver on my right hip wasn't going to be pulled very quickly. The closed leaf holster was great for hiking and retaining the weapon, but not so good to bring it out fast. I could get hit and be down before I had a chance, but I couldn't walk with a gun in my hand either. We needed both arms and legs for this. We were barely holding onto the side of the slope. A roll down was possible, but I decided to go down to the drainage anyway.
.
"We might as well get it done, verify what's possible and what's not with this valley. If this is a way in I want to know. If we can't make it through we need to know. We can always climb back to the cliffs."
It was as bad as I feared. We crawled over 20 and 30 foot piles of brush and debris. I used Trav's khuk to clear a few limbs from my path. Every time I do not carry a khuk I regret it. There is often a use for it. You find a wood sample you like, or a limb has fallen across the trail or the road and the truck needs more clearence. We made a hundred yards this way, crawling, and came to the end. A steep cliff rose 30 feet above the ravine. We couldn't climb it. We had to hike back to the top of the ravine and travel along the summit until we saw an opening into the forest below.
There were caves everywhere. There were nine we counted on the way in. We were straddling a crack between two mountains, it was narrow at the bottom, and perhaps several hundred yards between peaks of limstone at the top. We climbed along the shoulder, and looked above us. There was a cave and you couldn't mistake the rank urine smell. It was occupied, though from Packrat or Cougar I did not know. Above that was another cave. There was nowhere to climb without having a cave at your back or side. You could not watch all the entrances at once.
"I think I should fire some warning shots." I told the boys. The sound of gunfire would send any observers of us running, and alert any others back in the fissure that we were coming and were dangerous. I hoped that was good. I didn't want to be attacked by a hysterical cat leaping out because they'd heard gunfire. That's possible, isn't it? I fired the 41 four times, carefully pausing them so they wouldn't be heard down in the flat below and mistaken for a three shot cry for help The kids removed their palms from their ears, and we continued up the slope. I removed the ear plugs I brought. Nothing came out of the caves, and at the top we found a place in the thick duff with large scat. Real large. I'd hate to run into the cat that made those; human size. It was fairly easy to hike down once we crested. The slope behind the rock face was gentle compared to what we'd hiked earlier. We lowered ourselves over a spine of rocks, traveling the vertical height of the mountain, with a cave below us. Fortunately, there was nothing in the cave.
At the bottom it was a kind of magic. No one had been here in who knows how long? There were large boulders of the type I call 'pre agate'; that is, orange and red, with streaks of amber that are not quite agate and have much of the glass like quality. These rocks were as big as refridgerators. We loved them. This type of rock can be used for arrow heads.
We looked, but there were no deer tracks of any kind. I'd never seen a area in the Little Rocky's without deer sign.
"We're in Cougar Canyon," Trav said.
"Yeah, Cougar heaven," Carter added.
After drinking some water and eating the candy like health bars, we followed the drainage downwards. There was more scat. Real big, even bigger than what we'd seen before, and it was in plain sight. 20 feet away you'd see another pile. The animal was really making a plain statement, a warning. We were close to a den.
We came to the end of the fissue, the crack between the two mountains, and found what we thought was the drop that stopped us earlier. We could see a way around now. There were two large caves above us, and against my better judgement, Carter persuaded me to go up there. The caves themselves had no animal life, but on the way I saw where a cat had run up the side of the mountain, dislodging the moss on the rock as he or she went. That was spooky. The spot was exactly forward of our position climbing into this place. The cat had been ahead and watched us. It was true. If you enter Cougar lands you are observed. The gunshots must have sent him scrambling.
The caves had grey color running around and above them on the rock face, looking like the past smoke of indian fires, which was likely. The caves with smoke were on the side of the divide that faced north, probably because of wind direction and smoke control, and shelter from the elements. We found no snarling cats, thank God. I listened very carefully. At one point I thought I heard the thud of a body on rock in the distance, but I couldnt be sure. Whatever had been there was gone now.
We thought we'd just walk down, but as soon as we dropped below the rock face, we came to another, longer drop. It was the original cliff face that'd stopped us. We'd been wrong- there was no way down. There was a alder tree laying on its side. We had two small khuks. I thought about stripping the tree of the branches, except for several hand and leg holds, and lowering it down the drop. We could climb the tree to home. But I didn't want to risk it. Every time I take a khuk out into the wilderness I marvel at their usefullness. There just isn't another tool like it. We could shave time off our return journey. It would be easy. "Yeah, we trimmed a downed tree and made a ladder, we got home fast." What a wonderful end to our hike, a great story. But I could see the potential for a accident too, and so with the sun starting to climb down into the sky, we climbed back out of the dark bottom and up onto the slope again. Carter found a wild tulip growing and stuck it in his pack. Just a bulb with a shoot. We'd add that to the wild onions we'd transplanted at home. My son noticing the small wild things again. I'm proud of him. He's almost 12, and if he still sees them now as he enters the teen years, he probably always would. (We planted that tulip in our garden outside the house, and the deer ate it almost as soon as we had it in the ground. Apparently Deer like tulip buds. Well, tulips have a safe place to grow under the eyes of the cougar in the little canyon. I made a note of that for the future; tulips might mean no deer, and if there were no deer brousing there was a reason.)
I fired the extra rounds I'd brought, saving six for the road. 4 or 5 shots later we climbed off the mountain and went home. We were glad to get past those caves, all of us visibly more relaxed once we did. A weight came off our shoulders. You have to be aware, you can't relax. Well, at least I can't. I don't know about you. Maybe you could hike with a Ipod. Bring a TV, what the hell...
These walks take away some of the worry my boys have gathered onto themselves in their short years, already learning the anxiety of our modern world. I'm afraid their father has also added to their troubles, wanting to please him and feeling they cannot always do that. I remember what it's like.
Burdens just seem to lift when you step out of yourself, your routine. We all need another world to go to. It's very unlikely a cougar would ever attack us, but it didn't hurt the adventure any to take precautions, to be aware of our surroundings. The tracks in the broken moss on in the rocks had been real, the cats were there.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
munk
:thumbup: I hope you only get bitten by healthy ticks
I got ONE little bite on my inner thigh about 4 years ago, and had to be put on Doxycyclin (sp?) That almost made me feel worse than that creeping lime disease.
) that I was feeling fine in less than a week.
)