On June 14, 1844, John C. Fremont with Kit Carson and a larger group traveled along the eastern flank of the Sierra Madre in southern Wyoming. They were headed west following a nearly two-year-long exploratory trip throughout the West.
I don’t know the precise location of their camp that night, but I do know that it was along the creek that runs about a quarter of a mile below my house.
That part is easy to document because Fremont noted in his journal, “There were several beaver dams, and many trees recently cut down by the beaver. We gave to this the name of Beaver Dam creek, as now they are becoming sufficiently rare to distinguish by their name the streams on which they are found.”
Apart from my years in college, I’ve always lived in the Beaver Creek area, ten miles southeast of Encampment. Our house is at the end of the county road, though there are some properties above us, farther up along the creek, that are accessible on private roads. We are surrounded by pastureland and hay meadows.
This end-of-the-road location means we don’t have a lot of traffic, except this time of year when hunters who have access to the private land are coming and going from early in the morning until late at night.
This year is one that’s going down in the family history as the year of the critters.
It started in late spring when we first saw tracks, and then actually saw a bobcat and two kittens. And we also saw another lone bobcat that we assumed was a male. They hung around in the willows below our house and liked to wander up by Grandma’s Cabin.
By summer we didn’t see those kittens anymore, but one of the older bobcats routinely came around and we’d see it in the evening when we sat at our dining room table eating our dinner. It hunted gophers and prairie dogs and we started calling it by the original name of Bob.
One night not long ago the camera we have on our back deck caught a nighttime view of Bob – who had two new kittens so now we know Bob is a Bobbie and has some little Bobs (or Bobbies). In my family this is significant because I had an Uncle Bob and an Aunt Bobbie and a cousin we all call Little Bob.
In addition to the bobcats, this summer was filled with animals on the deck. We had a raccoon with four kits and one night a young black bear climbed over the pole railing to check out the area. Those raccoons and the bear showed up when the raspberries were just about ready for picking…they got them, we didn’t.
After one trip away from Beaver Creek for a few days, we returned to find a badger had moved into the neighborhood and had a fine old time digging holes all around the house and shop. We saw him on the nightly camera feed, climbing the steps to the back door. He didn’t come in and wasn’t successful at digging a hole under the foundation, either.
This time of year, when we sit outside in the evening, we hear the elk bugling down on the creek, the distinctive cry of sandhill cranes headed south, and the cry of geese.
Pretty much any time of year the sounds of what I call the Beaver Creek Symphony are routine in the evening: coyotes, owls, nighthawks. And since we live in ranch country, those wild critter sounds are complimented by the cattle – mama cows bawling for their calves, or the deep-throated sound of a bull.
It’s surprising how sounds travel in a quiet neighborhood. My nearest neighbor is a quarter of a mile away – and that’s where the former owner used to have peacocks, which we could hear because they make a sound that cuts through the air.
Another neighbor, who is about a mile away, has some hound dogs and we occasionally hear them at night. But nobody nearby along Beaver Creek has roosters and for that I’m grateful.
Candy Moulton can be reached at: Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
