Vics Blog

The New Year has begun and I suppose it’s time to make one of those big resolutions for 2012. Being a superstitious man and prone to the prophecies of the Mayan calendar and Nostradamus, I was pondering the necessity of it all having them predicting the end of the world on December twenty first. However, between now and then there’s a lot of important photography to be done recording the last days of all the critters on this planet. I don’t know who’ll look at them when we’re gone, but maybe aliens in a flying saucer will wonder what happened and it will all be recorded on my dvd’s for them to figure out.
Last fall I was up in the high mountain tundra when I noticed a big bruiser bull elk on top of a peak about a thousand yards away. The sun was just coming up and he was herding his harem of cows around a boulder field way up above the timberline. The scene was magnificent as the sun dripped golden light across his hide and antlers and made them glimmer against the dark rocks in the background. The sky was a deep Colorado blue. He bugled every two or three minutes and the steam from his bellowing lungs filled the frigid air. I knew that I had to shorten the distance between us to get some good shots.
Three thousand feet , loose boulders and high elevations make for a stiff hike when you’re just a bit out of shape. Starting out at a fast pace, I covered the first few hundred feet in no time and promptly felt like my heart was going to explode from my chest. Luckily he and his girls weren’t moving anywhere so I slowed the gait and covered the remaining ground in a relatively short time. Moving much closer, I started to put the sneak on them by taking cover behind some big granite rocks the size of small houses and staying downwind so they didn’t scent me. Then, slowly peeking out from my hiding spot I quickly realized that in the minute spent out of sight, the whole herd had begun to move back down the mountain that I’d just climbed up. Bummer!
The light was still incredible and those pictures were waiting to be had, so off I went right back down to where it had all started thirty minutes before. Luckily, the elk stopped for a little romance before disappearing over the next ridgeline and I had the chance to finally catch my breath and steady the camera. Thank goodness the Canon 100-400mm telephoto lens had image stabilization and the photos I took were some of my best.
That gets me back to my declaration for this year. In front of you and all the world and knowing of its eminent demise , I’m going to get in shape and make sure that when we all make it into 2013, you’ll still be around looking at my pictures.