Ryerse Family Adventures: Today was amazing, sad and I smell like a cow.

We are going into fire restrictions next week, so my job the last couple days has been to go out and identify what fire signs we have up and to GPS them. I've put a good 500 miles on my truck this week. It's actually really nice because I get to drive all through the forest by myself all day long. Today started out as just an amazing day. The sun was out and it was beautiful - in the upper 60's and not even windy. I drive a huge Dodge Ram 2500 with a 75 gallon tank of water and a pump in the back - I am not quiet coming up on the wildlife!! They usually just take off running as soon as they hear me, but today I saw a mare and her foal - some of our wild horses - just out grazing. They were beautiful! They just looked at me and kept on grazing.

I also scared a whole flock of turkeys out of a wash - there were at least 10 of them, 3 huge toms and 6 or 7 hens and chicks. Good thing turkey season just ended!!

I also saw a beautiful red-tailed hawk and a bald eagle, but they just wouldn't cooperate with me enough to get pictures. They were so magnificent!! We have an eagle nest out at one of our lakes and they have been successful in mating and nesting the last couple of years, so hopefully we will have more of them around.

Then I came upon this cow elk that had managed to get inside one of our wildlife exclosures - an area we fence off to keep the elk and deer out of to help the native plants and grasses grow back without all the grazing. She mostly just layed there and looked at me. After watching her for a while, I figured she must be pregnant.

Then she stood up and I could tell that she was badly injured. If you look closely, you can see that her back leg is quite bent and she stumbled a bit before laying down again.

I called our fish and game guy who came out and I had to witness him shoot the elk. We went into the enclosure to get her and found that she had a very bad compound fracture in her rear, right thigh bone. She was bleeding quite profusely. We also discoverd that she had, indeed, been in labor. It was one of the saddest moments of my life. There was so much blood. We had to walk the fenceline of the entire enclosure to find out where she had gotten in. She had done the same thing trying to find a way out - there was a trail of blood the entire perimeter. That poor creature had suffered so much!!

I had to help the game warden get the elk loaded into his truck and she smelled just like a cow and now so do I.

There was a small cemetery right next to the exclosure and it was pretty neat. The following graves are dated 1916 and 1908. I thought it was interesting...