Over Beartooth Pass--More Rodents!

There is something deeply disorienting about climbing high, high up over a mountain pass--let's say Beartooth Pass, between Montana and northern Wyoming--and going from hot hot summer, strip-off-your-shirt summer--to walls and fortresses of lingering snow, to American pipits scrounging snowflies, for Lord's sake, because there's nothing much else to eat.

If the hairpin turns and the million-foot dropoffs on the road weren't enough, that simple dissonance would be scary enough for a person like me, who is so tied to the seasons and the particular light of a particular time of year that I really don't know what to do with myself when everything is upside down and we're making snowballs in mid-June.

Snowfields, just now melting off. And mountain bluebirds, giving their low chortle and floating from boulder to boulder, just to bring me to my knees.

Mountain bluebirds in hard mountain light and thin mountain air, bolts of cobalt and cerulean, straight shots to the heart.


We get back in the car and OK now I'm a little freaked out by this.

I mean, we had a whole winter of this, well, nearly this, and I thought I could put my white knuckles away. Hon, will you please drive? I'm done.

Whoa. Car coming. Let's push on, get down to some altitude that makes sense for an Appalachian Ohio girl. I'm feeling a little woozy, here on top of the planet.

I know what will fix me. More cute rodents.

We offered Corn Nuts and almond bits, but sunflower seeds were the favorite. We looked him up in our Kaufman Field Guide to Mammals of North America.

Wrong page. Them's Californy chiptymunks.

Least chipmunk, Tamias minimus. Mmm, how cute! And teeny. And snappy and bold.

But wait! there's more. A golden-mantled ground squirrel, Spermophilus lateralis, such an arresting HUGE creature that it elicited gasps of "What the heck is THAT?" from us. The thing was at least 10" long and fat, fat, fat. I immediately christened it the Sumo Chipmunk.

No secret how it got that fat.

Gimme a peanut, now.

Dead heat between the yellow-bellied marmot and the Sumo Chipmunk for favorite rodent of the trip. He's just a guinea pig in chipmunk's clothing.

We made it through Beartooth Pass and happily descended into... YELLOWSTONE!!

Before we start wallerin' around in Yellowstone Park, I have a few pressing Ohio matters to share. Pawpaws and a spectacular caterpiggle... Speaking of Ohio matters, don't miss the next Ohio Ornithological Society conference October 8-10 at the Radisson Eastlake (Cleveland). Field trips, crazy great migration birding, even a Lake Erie 'pelagic' trip. People--it's an inland sea! and it has some surprisingly great birds. Go here for details.