This autumn, I explored the big-game migration corridor from Jackson Hole up the Gros Ventre Valley to the Green River drainage. The seasonal tide of migration tugs at the pronghorn and other species as their instincts draw them south to the sagebrush grasslands for the winter. The following are select accounts from my journal and what I encountered en route.
October 25. Pronghorn in Grand Teton National Park are staging near Kelly Warm Springs to begin their annual migration from the Gros Ventre to the Green River Valley. More than 50 of North America's fleetest mammals flank the road east of Blacktail Butte in the shadow of the towering Tetons.
They try in vain to cross a four-strand barbed wire fence until they find an open gate and flee across the road to join other pronghorn. Obstacles to this longest big-game migration route in the lower 48 states seem almost insurmountable, and the pronghorn's southerly fall migration has barely begun.
This ancient migration corridor continues to be used by many species in the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. From the ridge north of the steaming Kelly Warm Springs, I watch as moose, bison and mule deer join the pronghorn. Further up the ridgeline on state land, a rancher's cattle graze in aspen and willows, competing with wildlife for scarce forage during this drought year.
The pronghorn pass below the Red Hills Cliffs. As the steep grade narrows the valley, a natural bottleneck chokes off the corridor, forcing the animals to cut across the red sandstone slope. Once through the Red Hills bottleneck, the route spreads out across open sagebrush flats from Crystal Creek to Red Rock Ranch and Slate Creek.
The Jackson Hole Land Trust now has a conservation easement on the Red Rock Ranch's hay meadows and is working cooperatively with the landowner to protect the pronghorn migration corridor.
The pronghorn cross the river to use the natural Alkali Creek mineral lick and avoid the steep cliffs of the Gray Hills to the north. They later cross back over to the north side of the valley at Breakneck Ridge, where another 13 pronghorn does, fawns and bucks have gathered on the south-facing slopes.
Pronghorn tracks continue up Bacon Creek north of Sunday Peak on a single trail through a gate and double drift fence. The Forest Service's Bacon Creek and Fish Creek cattle allotments reveal heavy livestock grazing of the sparse forage, leaving little for migrating wildlife.
The animals follow the wide sagebrush bottom, past Wolf Gulch, where a coal-black wolf trots in a classic ground-eating stride along the ridgeline above Bacon Creek. Wolves have now returned to Southern Yellowstone where they were once an integral part of this migration route. The pronghorn reach the windswept Continental Divide near the headwaters of America's three major river systems -- Wind River to the Mississippi, Green River to the Colorado and Gros Ventre River to the Columbia. This high country is staggering in its beauty and gentle in its topography. Just as the waters of these mighty rivers flow across this land, so do the pronghorn and other migratory species.
November 1. Migrating wildlife spread out into the huge expanse of willow and sagebrush flats, frozen riparian bogs and potholes near Mosquito Lake. This easy mountain pass has now seen snow, and hundreds of elk, mule deer, pronghorn and moose have crossed the divide today enroute to their historic winter range in the Green River Valley.
November 14. The pronghorn have traveled down the Green River, detoured around subdivisions and threaded their way between narrow fence lines. Now they must cross Highway 191 between the Green and New Fork Rivers. A few does and fawns struggle under a recently improved right-of-way fence. A road-killed mule deer lies on the roadside as the pronghorn dart between vehicles. On they go, as if pulled by a magnet, to their winter home on the Pinedale Mesa that they must now share with industry.
Pronghorn and deer pass through the narrow bottleneck of Trapper's Point, negotiating a web of roads and fences to the Mesa and encountering many more gas wells than when they left last spring. In addition, the Bureau of Land Management recently approved winter gas drilling in crucial winter range despite the agency's own admission that range conditions are poor this year. This unprecedented waiver of stipulations protecting wintering wildlife illustrates the energy industry's increasing influence in the management of public lands throughout the West.
In this two-week period I have followed the pronghorn from their summer range to their winter habitat through a natural and human-caused obstacle course that deserves a yet-to-be-created legislative designation of "national migration corridor." Do we have the vision and wisdom to protect such key habitat so that wildlife can continue to follow their ancient paths to winter range? I fervently hope so.
A special thanks to Lloyd Dorsey and Tory Taylor for accompanying me on
various parts of this wonderful exploration of western Wyoming's historic
wildlife migration corridor. |
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