Friday, July 5, 2013

Empty Byway #4: Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, Montana



 

At southwest Montana’s Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, the shallow waters of Upper and Lower Red Rock Lakes and Swan Lake, along with adjacent marshlands, provide a home for a proliferation of birds and wildlife. The preserve is nestled between the Gravelly Range to the north and the spectacular Centennial Mountains on the south.


The 40,000-acre refuge was created primarily to provide sanctuary for the trumpeter swan, which in the 1930s was in danger of extinction. The bird’s population had dwindled to fewer than 100 individuals in the tri-state Montana-Idaho-Wyoming region by the end of the Great Depression, while only a few other remnant populations remained in Canada and Alaska. Happily, today the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem claims some 500 resident swans, and the influx of migratory birds from the north brings the number to several thousand in winter. 

Moose are year-round residents of the refuge, and deer, elk, and pronghorn are common in the snowless months. The bird life rivals that of nearly any place in the Rocky Mountain West: No fewer than 258 species can be seen at one time of the year or another, including bald eagles, avocets, long-billed curlews, great blue herons, sandhill cranes, white pelicans, tundra swans, and twenty-three species of ducks and geese. Migratory birds by the thousands appear during the spring and fall.


The impressive, snow-white trumpeters (watch this to see and hear why they're called that) are immense birds, measuring up to four feet from beak to toe and eight feet from wing tip to wing tip, and weighing as much as thirty pounds. And they’re hungry big birds with phenomenal metabolisms: It’s common for an adult to eat up to twenty pounds of wet herbage in a day’s time. 

To experience this isolated piece of country is well worth the trouble of getting there. The outpost of Lakeview—population ten—stands sentinel over the wetlands, and the refuge headquarters is found there. Lakeview is midway along the 60-mile gravel road connecting I–15 at Monida and Highway 87 west of West Yellowstone. The road is generally not passable by automobile until mid-May and is usually snowed in again by early November. 


The mountain bike is a good way to get there; in fact, the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route runs right through Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. 




From my journal, June 2002

Awakening at Upper Lake Campground in Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in mid-June is a bit like greeting the day on Montana’s version of a Tarzan movie set, considering all the noise the local critters make.

It started when it was still dark and starry with the resonant hoot of a great gray owl and two choruses of coyotes yipping, yammering, and squealing back and forth. From my tent it sounded like a demonstration of stereo speakers: One bunch of coyotes over there to the west; the other clearly off in another direction, somewhere to the southeast in the foothills of the Centennial Range.

With the first hint of light in the eastern sky, the Canada geese began honking, followed by the deeper and louder honking of trumpeter swans. Then ducks—hundreds of them, maybe thousands—began chiming in with their variously timbred quacking. Finally, dozens of songbirds added their melodic two cents’ worth to the mix. It all coalesced into a cacophony that was terribly dissonant if I tried to separate the sounds but marvelously musical if I just took it in as a whole. I’ve never heard anything quite like it anywhere else.

Adapted from Montana: Off the Beaten Path, 8th edition

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