This stretch has one of the most abrupt ecological gradients on the loop, and it is worth a minute of attention, because you are about to leave it behind.
Out west of us it is high desert — sagebrush, rabbitbrush, chamisa, piñon and juniper, ten or twelve inches of rain a year. On our right, going up, it is spruce-fir forest and eventually alpine tundra with thirty or more inches, mostly as snow. You can travel between those two worlds in a fifteen-minute drive, and to do the equivalent by latitude you would have to go from Mexico to central Canada.
That compression is why the wildlife list here is so long.
On the sage flats: pronghorn — the fastest land animal in the Western Hemisphere, and not actually an antelope; it has no close living relatives anywhere. Jackrabbits with those enormous heat-shedding ears. Coyotes. Prairie dogs, whose towns support ferruginous hawks, badgers and burrowing owls.
In the piñon-juniper: black bear working down for piñon nuts in a good year, mule deer, bobcat, and the piñon jay — a blue bird that travels in big noisy flocks and whose whole life is bound up with those nuts.
Overhead, all the way along: golden eagles and red-tailed hawks riding the thermals off the mountain front. Ravens, which up here are the size of small dogs and considerably smarter than they look.
Photo: mypubliclands · Public domain