New Bighorn Release Planned, Bigelow Sunset – 10/26/2014

More bighorns being relocated to Catalinas, Arizona Daily Star, Doug Kreutz – The first news article that I have seen about the intent to release 30 additional Bighorns into the Santa Catalina Mountains before the end of the year. There are a number of interesting details in the article including: the intended primary source of sheep is from the Tonto National Forest and that “the exact sheep release sites in the Catalinas will not be disclosed to the public”.

The Bighorn Sheep Restoration Project Status update for 9/29 to 10/12 has been available for over a week now (all updates are currently available here) – no changes are noted in population numbers, some interesting research notes are included: “we will use the sheep location data being collected via satellite collars to quantify an “intensity of space use” for each sheep by constructing a utilization distribution (UD)”.

 

1410 Sunset off the Bigelow Road
Clouds in the Sunset from a hillside near the Bigelow Road not far from Mount Bigelow. October 2014.

I enjoyed an evening run on 1918, Secret and Bigelow Road – on 1918 thru Bear Wallow there are still fall colors on the trees and the fallen leaves on the trail were a treat – the big trees on Secret made the dark cool evening even more enjoyable after our long summer – this was the first time I can remember in recent months that it was cool enough for a long sleeve shirt! 4.9 miles, +/- 890′ of elevation gain/loss.