Bear Valley

It was a mystical morning, gilded with an ethereal fog, lit vaguely from above by early morning's first attempts at daylight, and accompanied by a delicate and heavily layered orchestra of exotic sounds.  There were birds of more species than I can name, including the Nighthawk, Sandhill Crane, and some impossibly clear song sounding like a mythic melody played on an instrument blown of the purest glass.  Threaded into that soundtrack was the occasional burst of elk noises, cows grunting and calling to each other as they grazed along in the dewy grass.

We are still holed up at Dagger Falls, but headed out early to Bear Valley, only a few miles away, to try to film some elk and their calves cavorting in the wide meadows.  We had barely begun looking when we ran across three bull elk, bunched at the edge of the fog bank, surprised at our sudden arrival.  They trotted off into the fog and wildflowers, relaxing once they had put a few hundred yards between us and them, and obliged our lenses by looking regal and statuesque through the morning vapor.  While Isaac filmed, I walked around in a musical stupor, the stereo microphone leading me into pockets of lush sounds, which I recorded with reckless abandon.  

We then moved on, filming a few wide shots of opaque fog laying heavy over the meandering Bear Valley Creek as the sun barely squinted over the nearest ridge, creating something I had never seen before this particular morning: a fogbow.  No color, just a gauzy arc springing lightly from the moist earth and hanging over our heads wherever we moved.  

Hearing the elk noises, we attempted to find their origins in the fog, but true to the magic of the morning, wherever we moved, the noise would sound elsewhere.  We slushed through marshy areas up to our knees in water, and eventually came up against the river, too deep to cross.  We did eventually spot the elk, grazing on the other side a quarter mile away.  Redwing Blackbirds ended up taking the limelight as they cruised and swooped over our heads in the new light, singing and playing for the camera with flashes of red on jetblack wings.

Though we found no cavorting elk calves, only browsing elk cows munching the juicy grasses, it was such a mystic morning it didn't seem to matter.