Home On The Range

Just offering up a randomly selected image from the archives. This one from Yellowstone National Park:

We had seen them all during our brief stay there as part of our 4,500-mile road trip in 2006. We marveled at bison, elk, moose, black bear, grizzly, coyote — even the elusive gray wolf. But not the fabled pronghorn antelope. Not the fastest land animal of North America, second in the world only to the cheetah. Not until this morning of July 8, when at 6:17 a.m. we came around a bend in the highway and found this one catching the new morning’s sun and scouting from atop a ridge.

We were fortunate in that our arrival predated by a couple of minutes that of an inconsiderate member of my species who destroyed the silence and serenity after spying the stately animal from the road and then noisily sped its SUV to a gravel-spitting stop in the turnout that sent the pronghorn rightly scampering away out of view. And me rightfully grumbling at what noxious chumsuckers we humans can be.