Antelope Flats

According to the binder, I should have been able to drive all the way to my next survey along Red Creek, a tributary to the Green River. The weather had other plans. Dark clouds built up while I drove north to Browns Park from Vernal, rumbling all the way. I drove past the dinosaur tracks at Red Fleet State Park and up and over the Uinta Range where snow still lay beneath the trees to the sagebrush steppe and steep hills of northeast Utah. The last 3 miles were along a two-track dirt road and would probably get too muddy to drive if wet. For a moment I considered trying to drive through it, but then I decided that I was risking too much embarrassment if I got myself stuck within hiking distance of my transect. Instead, I found a gravel pullout along the main road and set up camp there.

I was glad I did. The wind blew faster and faster, blowing out the flame of my camp stove and making a pre-bed pee a risky procedure. The storm was building up momentum and once it reached over the surrounding peaks it unleashed its full fury. I quickly finished all my nighttime tasks outside of the car and then bundled up in my sleeping bag to watch the lightning dance across the sky and illuminate the summits around me. I was very glad to be camping on a hard surface where I didn’t have to worry about the car getting stuck in the mud, even if it meant I had to wake up at 3:30 a.m. the next day to hike to my transect. 

That following morning, I thoroughly regretted being sensible. It was dark and early, and so far away from civilization that it felt a little eerie. After the first half-mile though, I was glad I was hiking instead of driving. Where there should have been road, there was a large hole. Spring snowmelt and erosion had turned a creek crossing along the road into a mud pit with cut banks that I couldn’t have driven through without getting stuck and, worst of all, having to make a phone call to get myself out again.

This parcel of land was used for cattle grazing and between their stomping and their pooping the creek had turned into a muddy mess with thick clumps of algae. I tried to pick the shallowest part to cross but still felt the uncomfortable sensation something wet seeping in over the top of my boots.

As I got close to my transect, I met another obstacle: the cattle themselves. A herd of angus cows and calves watched with curiosity as I squelched closer. My first point was directly on the other side of them. I remembered the horse incident from a few days ago and gave them a wide berth.

The transect lay on the side of a steep-sided valley. The bottom was flat and the sides rose in steep, parallel ridges. The first four points were easy walking through the valley bottom. Pocket gopher tunnels ran back and forth across the ground in a giant spiderweb. After the first four points, the hard work began. The gullies between the ridges were steep and rocky and it was easiest to do the points ascending one ridge, cross to the next one, then descend on that ridge, rather than staying on the same elevation band and crossing over more than once. Crossing the gullies was awkward. They had eroded into jagged rock shelves choked with thick vegetation and it usually took some extra climbing or descending to find a good place to cross that was low enough or with strong enough handholds that I could scramble out of them again.

It was a physically demanding survey and soon I was panting and my quads were burning with the effort of hiking up the steep slopes again and again. A wildfire had passed through some years before, burning the foliage off the trees and leaving only their black skeletons standing. That didn’t mean there was no life—the mountain bluebirds (recognizable by their breathy, slightly apologetic song) and lazuli buntings were thriving.

I knew from the database that the person who did this survey the year before had only managed to do 12 out of the 16 points because they ran out of time and I desperately wanted to reach all 16. Was it a competition? No. Did I still want to win? Yes.

To get to the final point I had to scramble up a steep slope of loose gravel and only managed by holding on to a few scraggly shrubs along the way. From the high point here I had a view of the whole valley, green with spring grass and only one road in sight between me and the horizon. It was isolated, and wild, and beautiful.

After I finished my survey, I went back to the car. My next survey was only a 30-minute drive away and I was able to park right next to it so that I didn’t have to hike far. All my surveys so far had been extremely scattered, with a minimum of two and a half hours of driving in between, that it was a novelty to suddenly be there already with the whole afternoon still ahead of me. I sat in the back of the car and caught up on some of my data entry with my binoculars close at hand in case an interesting bird made an appearance.

There was something very satisfying about having everything I needed right there in the car with me. If I wanted to do some data entry, I could. If I wanted to grab some snacks, my food crate was right next to me. When I got fed up with doing data entry all I had to do was grab my running shoes and set off in any direction to go for a run.

Dusk would have been a great time for a wildlife walk with my camera, but come evening, I was usually too exhausted to do anything. All day long I was birding, hiking, running, living life to its full capacity, that at the end of it all I could do was collapse on my sleeping pad.

Here at least, on the aptly named Antelope Flats, the safari came to me. In the evening, a pronghorn antelope buck walked through the sagebrush in front of my camp. He grazed for a while and then raked his antlers through the sagebrush. To get rid of parasites? To hone them (pronghorn antelope are unique in that they have deciduous horns that they shed every year)? Because he, like me, liked the smell? He didn’t stay long enough to answer.

It rained on and off through the night, but morning dawned dry and beautiful. Orange milk vetches and pink phlox peered out at me from underneath the shrub story. I kept my eyes peeled for pronghorn antelope horns, although as they are made from keratin they degrade quickly and are harder to find than antlers. I’d also heard stories of coyotes and foxes taking them to gnaw on and play with. That wasn’t surprising—I had seen foxes claim plenty of weird objects as their own. Once, I lost one half of a pair of running shoes that I left outside to air out overnight after a long trail run. When I went outside the next morning, the left shoe was missing and a set of tracks in the fresh snow showed that a fox had come by, picked it up, and trotted away with it as a prize. I never got it back.   

A trio of female pronghorns shadowed me from the ridge above me as I hiked between the points on my transect. They probably had fawns hidden nearby—otherwise all I would have seen of them would have been their white rumps as they ran away. Instead, they barked commentary at me the for the next two points, probably giving their opinion on the vegetation data.

The sagebrush was full of Brewer’s sparrows, rock wrens, and both spotted and green-tailed towhees. Towhees, much like knights who say ni, love a good shrubbery. You can hear them scratching in the leaf litter at the bottom of shrubs or singing from the tops of them. The alarm call of the spotted towhee sounds like a cat, although the alarm call of the green-tailed towhee also sounds like a cat so this isn’t the easiest way to distinguish them. It’s better to listen to the sound quality—the spotted sounds enraged and the green-tailed sounds like it thinks it deserves a treat.

The spotted towhee’s song is clear and succinct. It knows what it wants and is yelling its order (drink drink TEA) at an underpaid barista. The green-tailed towhee’s song sounds like its asking for a much more complicated order (to the consternation of the same barista).

As I worked, I heard worrying rumbling that grew louder and louder. I was convinced it was the stallion from a few days ago coming to grind me into a paste beneath its hooves. Instead, it was a thunderstorm roiling over the hills. I watched it raging in the distance from the corner of my eye while I tried to finish a couple more points to get to the minimum of six I needed. It was tricky to hurry when there were treasures hidden in the sagebrush that kept distracting me: pink sego lilies; the meandering tracks of a coyote; a ground squirrel peeking out of its burrow at me. The rock wrens weren’t bothered by the impending rain and kept singing from every rock they could find.

When the rain started in earnest the birds grew quiet and my datasheets threatened to turn into papier mâché. I retreated to the forerunner to wait out the storm and snoozed in the driver’s seat while I listened to the rain pounding the windshield. When the storm passed two hours later I still had enough time to survey a couple more points before the end of my survey window.