ISU Bengal

Issue date: 1/31/07 Section: Outdoor

Media Credit: Ryan Rossi A cow and her calf hiding in the grass.

Five degrees is cold, but it's not cold enough to keep me indoors for a whole week. So after five days of sitting inside reading, studying, and writing, I called a couple of friends from my neighborhood to see if they would be willingly step outside with me and enjoy the snow on a Saturday morning. Strangely enough, I found three guys who were willing to get up before dawn, leave their homework, their wife and children, and visit nature with me in all its frigidity.

Make that two guys. We left our on-campus housing at 7:15am when friend number three failed to appear and accompany us into the seven degrees of heat that were blowing through the sagebrush and juniper that morning. Maybe his bed was just too warm, or maybe his baby had kept him up all night.

By the time we parked at the Gibson Jack trailhead, the gray sky was dully glowing. We left our headlamps in the car and crunched our way up the steep entrance. The creek that runs along the trail was iced over, but even in the below-freezing weather, water under the ice rumbled soothingly above the echoes of the train and the hum of the interstate behind us.

"There's a moose that lives up here," I told my friends. Since I had initiated the hike, I had a desire to appear knowledgeable. At seven degrees, snow squeaks like breaking Styrofoam, so I had to repeat my comment several times until they stopped to hear what I had said.

"Oh," was their only reply.

Sometimes we had to let the weight of the winter morning force us into silence, so that we could observe: animal tracks (dog, squirrel, rabbit, and ungulate), human tracks (foot, ski, mountain bike), and the terrain around us. Suddenly we ran into the moose I had mentioned. She faced us head on, then lowered her ears and continued munching on the shrub in front of her. I again played the expert for my friends:

"I've been closer than this to a moose before. We're at a safe distance... unless she has a baby standing on the other side of the trail behind those bushes." We laughed and continued to advance until a calf awkwardly leaped from behind those exact bushes and galloped up the hillside to stand behind its mother. This caused us to pause again, but soon the animals went far enough up the hillside to allow us passage on the trail without humans or animals feeling threatened.

We hiked until we reached the agreed-upon landmark, a large timber bridge that spans the creek hidden in a thicket of Douglas Fir. We figured that we had hiked about two miles and had seen enough wildlife to feel human for another week. Plus we knew that our children were waking up and watching Saturday morning cartoons without us. The water passed openly in the creek under our feet for a few needed moments of silence in the wild lands, and then we turned around for the hike home.

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