Friday Funday

 We haven't gotten a decent storm system in I dont know how long.  Bottom line......too long.  But, as I have preached about before, if you are a sledder, quality snow can almost always be found.  That was the case yesterday.  It was literally t shirt weather (55 in parking lot) but up in the alpine there were nice pockets of north facing, shaded powder.  

Good crew yesterday.  Rode with Drewski and Scuba and a few other dudes we had never ridden with before.  WOrking our way outta a gully.  Man do pictures take the slope out of things! 

 Slashing the fresh.  

 Lucky for us, we generally seek out the path of most resistance with where we like to sled, so, running into other tracks is of little concern!  

Sledding affords one the opportunity to enter into a world that very few humans get to see, and that is, the dead of winter a long, long, long ways from any civilization.  The backcountry largely doesn't get visited by humans for 7 months of the year save for sledders.  So, you get to come across interesting things in the animal world on a sled that you wouldn't otherwise.  Such as....., a very, very fresh elk kill via wolves.  We saw this double homicide yesterday and it perplexed us for a lot of reasons.  It was as fresh as could be.  No rotting of the two bodies we saw, one of which we thought to be a calf and was picked to the bone, the other, in this picture, a cow that had been brutally drug across the snow and impaled on the tree you see.  The amount of wolf tracks around this scene was unreal.  What perplexed us was this was at close to 9,000 feet with a snowpack of close to 80 inches.  Aka, what in the hell were these elk doing up here and this is also in an area where you don't hear a ton about summer time wolf activity.  Our guess, the elk got trapped up high by an early season snow storm, never made it to the valley floor feed grounds, and eventually got weakened and were easy prey for the wolves.  

This all got me thinking....., just remember in life, there are two sides to almost every situation, hot button political issue, etc....... Anyone who is a supporter of wolves being in our ecosystem (of which I am) I feel a lot of these supporters are so one sided in their love of the wolves they have blinders on to just how savage of an animal they are and have never seen a seen like this.  It will give you a moment of pause all you wolf apologists!  (Dad!)