When I travel almost anywhere locally, I tote my camera. It usually sits unused—but now and then, something interesting turns up. Last evening was such an occasion. In rain and failing light, I saw a half-dozen female elk.
Elk are certainly around here, but I don’t see them often enough. Here are four pictures of wet-looking members of this group.
NATURE’L
I love the photos, Alistair. So clean, real, natural, and the girls had no time for make-up 🙂 That’s how it is; that [is] what we get ! ! !
Bill, as I understand it, the people on your side of the Purcell Mountains experience elk in vastly greater numbers than those on our side. In the West Kootenay, elk are a delightful curiosity; in the East Kootenay they are ho hum. Is this correct?
Just as a matter of curiosity, just where did you see and photograph these elk?
I have been stationed here for a little over four-and-a-half years. In the late fall and again in the late winter I sometimes see a herd of elk, cows and calves so far as I can tell in the usually dim light, in a farmer’s field beside Highway 31 about three kilometres south of Miror Lake, occasionally up to 30 elk at a time. And once I saw a cow elk trying to jump over the barricade on the river side of Highway 3 West about half a kilometre west of the turnoff to Upper Bonnington, I have been surprised that I see so few elk in my travels in this area.
Elk are more common on the eastside of our lake – see the February issue of Mainstreet for a picture of a herd of about 100 crossing Hwy 3A. There were none here until 1949 when George Oliver of Gray Creek shot one by mistake for a mule deer, up his trapline trail.
I think that while they do have larger herds of Elk (towards Cranbrook) the bigger factor for people seeing them is that the terrain in the East Kootenay lets the Elk be seen. I am often in areas local to Nelson where I know there are Elk and yet I might only see them at certain times of the year.
Gord, I had never even considered that as a possible explanation. Yet, I have been in a community in the East Kootenay where the elk wandered around the streets in the evening. That doesn’t happen on this side of the Purcells.