Mike Drew: Bull elk bugles and a dusting of snow

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There was fresh snow in the mountains.

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No big surprise, really. It is October, after all, and the weekend had been cool and rainy so the chances of there being snow in the higher elevations were pretty good. Rain down here, snow up there.

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But then I got a text message from my friend Mike. He had decided to go have a look and the pictures he sent me from the high country around Hailstone Butte were, well, spectacular. Snow everywhere, from the valley floor to the mountain peaks.

I just had to go have a look for myself after seeing that. But it was already mid-afternoon by the time I saw the pictures so it was too late to make the drive out there before the sun went down. The next morning, though, I would hit the road.

The FJ was humming southwest from the city by 6:30 with the sky barely beginning to brighten. It was foggy when I left the house but that had cleared up by the time I reached the city limits. Still, though, I thought it might be worth making a detour into the hills around the Cross Conservancy to see if I could find some valley mist. I was driving right past it anyway so why not have a look.

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There was a little bit of mist in the Pine Creek valley so I stopped by the beaver meadow to aim my camera. But as I rolled down the window to try a quick shot, I forgot all about the mist.

The bugle of a bull elk is one of the greatest sounds in nature, right up there with the warble of a loon or the honking of a flock of geese. It is a truly wild sound, a rising whistle followed by a loud, trumpet-like crescendo that often drops into a short series of grunts. It’s both eerie and musical and in the still air of a pre-dawn morning, it seems to echo forever.

I should have expected it, really. There are a couple of hundred elk roaming these hills barely 10 km from the city limits and it is pretty common to see them on a drive through the area. And besides, it is their mating season, the time of year when the bulls announce their presence with their calls.

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Still, the bugling caught me by surprise, all the more so because it sounded like it was very close. And I thought I knew where it was coming from.

The elk were at the top of the hill right beside the road. It was still too dark to see them very well on the grassy hillside around me but there were close to a hundred of them grazing high enough up to be silhouetted by the brightening sky behind them.

I could see one big bull walking back and forth among the cows and calves, pausing occasionally to sniff the ground or approach a female. It was all gorgeously lit with the sunrise and a bank of cloud overhead that would soon catch the first rays of dawn.

But lovely as it was to see, the best part was the sound.

I could hear bulls bugling all around me, their hollering echoing across the valleys. The cows and calves were making noise, too, little chirps and peeps and squeals. From the darkness close by came a clattering that sounded like sticks being broken for kindling and it took me a second to realize it was a pair of bulls locking antlers.

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And among all those sounds, ravens and magpies, a flock of geese flying by, a dog barking from, I dunno, somewhere.

The sun broke the horizon and scattered light across the hills, lighting all the magnificent fall colours and skimming across the fog bank that still lay to the east. And with it, the elk moved off the frost grass and started drifting into the aspens that lay in the valleys and on the slopes of the hills. The sounds continued but now they were muffled by the trees. Less frequent, too.

At which point I remembered I was actually headed out to photograph mountain snow and began to resume my route. A hundred or so elk, bulls bellowing and battling, a lovely sunrise and a gorgeous autumn landscape. I dunno, I guess I’m just easily distracted.

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The light continued lovely as I headed south. I passed a whitetail doe on the side of the road that posed in a patch of brightness and then found a sextet of bucks and does running along close to Diamond Valley. The wind started to pick up a bit as I passed Longview and clouds were beginning to build as I rolled by Pekisko.

The mountains were all snow-covered, bright white against the gathering greyness of the clouds, but as I made the turn toward them just north of Chain Lakes, I could see hardly any snow at all.

I was in the same valley that my friend Mike had been in the day before and he had texted me that the countryside had been snowy all the way from Chain Lakes up to the summit of the road on Hailstone Butte. That had been less than 24 hours before. Now, though, there was none.

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I guess I should say there was none in the low spots. Up on the ridges where the golden aspens and orange patches of roses give way to spruce and limber pines, there were little patches of white. But here in the Stimson Creek valley, it looked like it had all melted.

That changed as I gained elevation, though. The hills surrounding the beaver ponds at the head of the valley were white around the trees and over in the Willow Creek valley there were patches of snow in the campground and along the creek.

There’s a gate that’s closed here through the winter barring access up along Johnson Creek but for now it was still open. And it didn’t take long to get to snowier areas along the road. Except for ruts cut by passing vehicles, the road was snow-covered and it lay thick among the trees most of the way to the Hailstone Butte summit. From there, I stopped and looked back down the valley.

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The view was roughly the same but the look was completely different. Where Mike’s pictures showed snow cover as far as the eye could see, mine just showed a dusting on the hilltops. The road around me out here in the open was bare while Mike’s photos showed deep, snowy ruts. Could it have melted that much in less than day? Yeah, I guess it could.

I turned around now and headed back down the valley. I’d been in a bit of a hurry to have a look at the summit, so I’d driven on past a few things I wanted to go back to photograph.

Near the summit were clumps of buttercups with their yellow flowers still intact and on the shadiest slopes, there were green patches of alder springing back up as the snow melted away from them. Little spring-fed creeks had cut trails through the snow cover and were starting to run brown with snowmelt.

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A lot of the parking areas were occupied with the vehicles of, I guess, hunters but there was one higher up that barely had any tracks in the snow. Aspen and poplar leaves lay like a buttery blanket under the trees, the radiant heat they’d absorbed from the scant sun causing them to sink into the snow melting beneath them. Green thistles pushed up here and there, sloughing off the snow cover as the springiness in their stems uncoiled them.

But the snow was melting quickly as the day warmed, so I headed back up to the summit again and down the other side. The snow here was much deeper, especially on the west side of the summit, but it petered out quickly by the time I’d driven the few kilometres down to the Livingstone River valley.

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There was no snow at all on the valley floor and very little surrounding it. The few cattle left down there from official summer grazing were clustered along the river and a single redtail hawk — one of the last of the year — perched in a tall spruce. Both the river and its tributary Mean Creek flowed crystal clear.

It was all quite pretty with the greens and golds of autumn all around but I was there for the snow so I headed back up the Twin Creek valley to the summit.

The wind was howling at the summit — a chinook flow coming in — but on the lee side I noticed how the snow cover brought out the mosaic of autumn colour that it was surrounding. And looking down into the valley from the same viewpoint I’d been at an hour before, I could see how even more of the snow had melted.

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The alders were springing back up as I headed down the twists from the top and the aspens by Bear Pond that had dropped their leaves on the snow around their trunks were now surrounded mostly by bare, wet grass. There was still plenty of snow in the shaded areas deeper in the valley but with that chinook wind coming in, it wouldn’t likely last.

With the clouds gathering darkly, I stopped where Willow Creek and Johnson Creek meet to take pictures of the autumn forest and the limber-pine studded ridge above it before hitting Stimson Creek again. Pretty much all of the snow I’d seen earlier was now gone, though I could see a bit of it remaining on the higher ridges in the view from my little drone.

The autumn colours here were stunning, as if the snowfall had scrubbed and polished them. Aspens and poplars glowed lime and lemon and orange while the dark greens of the spruce and pine added a counterpoint. And it looked like that back in the Cross Conservancy, too, when I drove through on the way home, hoping to find the elk again.

If only we could count on all that colour lasting. But we all know how fleeting fall in southern Alberta is. Kind of like this snowfall.

Don’t know why but I just felt I had to see it after Mike sent those pictures. And, strangely, I felt a bit disappointed it wasn’t as snowy less than a day later.

But I got to see all those elk and a lovely sunrise and deer and gorgeous autumn leaves. And, yeah, quite a bit of bright, fresh snow. All of it was wonderful.

So thanks, Mike, for sending me those pictures.

They led to a pretty great day.

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