I’m not sure it’s possible to have a better weekend. Aside from it being Mother’s Day weekend, and having a delightfully wonderful daughter and pretty much the best mom on the planet, I also was able to sneak in a hike and wrapped up the weekend with something so unexpectedly amazing I sincerely questioned whether or not I was awake or dreaming.
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Anna (my daughter) and I kicked off the weekend with another evening drive out east of town. It was a pretty typical drive, but it did afford us a shower in a decent rain storm and a glimpse of some new-to-this-earth animals who were as fresh as they were cute.
It’s been a challenge to get Anna to engage in these outings. She is not only 10 going on 11 but she has recently bought a new tablet which she is constantly burying her nose in. I’ve started coming up with games and challenges to try to engage her with the real world around her. I think she is starting to enjoy the time and and has even spotted a few critters before I have. She especially likes the fact that I have started bribing her with ice cream in exchange for her company.
One of the best moments on our Friday evening excursion was a stop alongside the road to observe a fairly young colt. Anna requested the chance to get out and pet it, which I granted. The colt was a little shy and darted back behind the comfort of its more mature field-mates, but the other horses welcomed Anna’s touch and it lit me up inside to watch the interaction. We chased a few hawks and caught a lovely sunset before heading back to town for the ice cream.
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Saturday found me and a pack of my nearest and dearest friends wandering some freshly logged and very obstacle-laden terrain in the Cathedral Spires. They have been clearing the beetle kill but haven’t quite gotten around to cleaning up after themselves yet. We clumsily climbed up a valley between two giant walls of granite until we could not climb any higher (without ropes). As we sat and enjoyed the view I started to notice a rather high quantity of animal scat. I determined that it belonged to Mountain Goats and, considering the volume, we decided we were hanging out in an area where the goats liked to hang out too. We didn’t see any, but I am fairly sure I heard one as it ran off trying its best to hide from our pack of dogs.
Aside from noticing the scat from our resting point I also caught a glimpse of a rock climber across the valley on a neighboring spire. That area is a hot spot for climbers so I really didn’t think much of the fella until I noticed him again on the way back down the mountain. I looked up just in time to see that they weren’t just climbing but that they had run a slack-line between two spires and were JUST about to tight-rope walk across it. I was able to get the camera cued up and did a passing job of recording the event. It was truly a sight to behold.
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“goats”
Sunday, of course, was Mother’s Day. The day started with a side journey with just me and my wonderful mom out to an area I have been frequently exploring for photo adventures. There were a few sites out there I wanted to share. I especially wanted to show her a grouping of very large nests my friend Eric and I had spied on a previous adventure. They were perched at the very top of some giant cottonwood trees about a half a mile off the side of the road. Eric started to refer to them as “goats” (Eric has a special sense of humor… I appreciate it very much). Of course, they aren’t really goats, they are nests, but I liked the idea of them being called “goats” so I kept the name.
My mom had a pretty great pair of binoculars in her truck so I was able to make out the faintest shape of a very large bird perched on the top of the nest. “I think those are blue herons!” I exclaimed. My statement was met with hesitant disbelief and since I was unable to make an absolute identification we headed on and I continued to point at things and say “and this is where I took that one picture…” and “when we were here Anna did this… “
The last thing I wanted to show her before we fetched up the rest of the family for our official Mother’s Day outing was a fresh batch of tiny baby sheep Anna and I had happened across a few days earlier. We had a blast watching the little fluff balls play in the field and laughed as one seemed to be as allergic to the air as we are and proceeded to sneeze in a most familiar way.
After the sheep we swooped up my daughter and brother and we set out to aimlessly wander the Black Hills. Our quest consisted mostly of trying to find a place to eat lunch but circumstance after circumstance pushed the event back to about 3:00pm when we finally landed at Legion Lake. We shared a meal of BBQ and I chased around some beautiful swallows with my camera. Anna was able to dip her toes in the water before we loaded back up and hit the king of all Black Hills Roads, Iron Mountain, and headed home. The weather was perfect and I can’t think of a more lovely way to spend a day than celebrating our mom-ness with our kid-people in the Black Hills.
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The family affair was over but my hunger for adventure wasn’t yet satiated. I could tell by the thin clouds and the lazy sun that the sunset was going to be a good one, so I thought I would wonder out one last time in search of one more thing to focus my camera on… I had no idea I was about to discover the thrill of a lifetime.
I had already visited my usual location earlier with mom so I decided to take another direction out of town. I headed North instead of East and was surprised at how quickly I was gifted the final gift of my Mother’s Day.
I crested a hill just outside of town when I noticed a very familiar site. I instantly recognized another patch of “goats” in some trees. Only this time instead of a handful there were dozens and instead of the nests being too far away for me to see they were in the tops of trees right next to a side road. I pulled off without hesitation and lost my breath as I noticed 50 or so very large nests each inhabited by its own blue heron tending to the eggs. I sat and watched as their partners came and went, returning with fresh twigs and sticks to fortify their homes.
It was without a doubt one of the most breathtaking sites I had ever seen. I had no idea that they nested in colonies like that. Its hard to find the words to describe the feelings I had as I watched them come and go. I shot hundreds of photos and couldn’t bring myself to start the car and leave even after I had filled every gig of memory space I had, but as the sun went down I did find the will-power to turn the key and drive away.
As I drove back to town a single heron flew above me following the same road. I laughed at how, had I not just spent all that time with so many birds, I would have freaked out at the site of that single bird flying above me. I didn’t appreciate the solitary bird any less but I did look at it in a totally different way.
