elk | Life on a Colorado Farm

The water at Blue Mesa Reservoir is horribly low….Terry says it is down about the size of the length of a football field. Blue Mesa Reservoir is also an extremely long reservoir—20 miles long.

Taylor Reservoir is still frozen over, but starting to thaw. It is low also, but nothing like this. Taylor Reservoir flows into the Blue Mesa Reservoir along with tributaries from other creeks and rivers.

Going back home (on the way up we went through Montrose to Gunnison then to Almont) we took ‘the long way home’ over the rim of the Black Canyon to Crawford, Hotchkiss, and then Delta.

The Black Canyon is the pathway of the Gunnison River, from which our irrigation and drinking water arrives to us.

We saw lots of deer, some elk, but the best was this Cub…wandering across the road.

He/she was heading to the other side, where Momma was probably waiting.

Having a little trip was really nice…broke up the work so we felt refreshed and able to get ‘back at it’; glad to do so!

Off now to work in the yard. I’m planting. I have cut my amount down considerably…two years ago I had 175 containers in 9 beds. Last year I cut down to 75 containers and nine beds. This year….I’m tired. I have 10 containers and the nine beds which at times still seems too much.

Anyway off to plant!

Linda

As we entered the park we were told “WATCH OUT FOR THE BEARS”!! and then given all sorts of brochures telling us to watch out for the wildlife, do NOT get close to the animals…in the Visitor Center were video’s running of people getting hurt by the wildlife.

So we were pretty open to ‘seeing’ wildlife.

It must have been the wrong time of the year

We saw very little…..

But what we saw were traffic stoppers! If we came upon cars stopped every which way (including tour bus—of which there were MANY), even in the middle of the road we knew some type of animal was up ahead.

We saw…………….

A cool family of Buffalo

An elk

A very thin deer (in Green River)

Another elk (the following two photos and the deer above were taken by Wayne Maxwell)

Taken in the evening on the second day

Lots of crows

A cool little butterfly

Several bear at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, Montana

(Photo by Wayne Maxwell)

Wolves

Then I saw the Three Bears

And I KNOW this is stupid, but I got to take a photo of a magpie!

Those birds are extremely hard to photograph. I happen to think they are beautiful birds.

We don’t have them in our area anymore…the ravens and the crows have pushed them out. They maybe living in other parts of Delta and Montrose County, but I, personally, haven’t seen any for a very long time.