The last two months have seen temperatures between 5 and 10 degrees below normal. The grass is way behind where it should normally be now, but we are running out of hay so the cows will go out on grass in a couple days anyway. It has rained or snowed almost every day since mid February and the sun has only peaked out a few times, which doesn't help to raise the temperature or encourage the grass to grow. I should be happy after the drought we have experienced over the last years, but that drought helped to damage the roots of the grasses, so the mud is worse than I've ever seen it. We had some sunshine and temperatures in the 60's for the last two days and I started to feel encouraged that maybe we might start growing some grass. We drove the RTV out into one of the lower pastures to check grass growth and this is what we saw. I could count over 50 elk in this group. I have been cutting the numbers of cows because of drought, but it looks like we will need to cut even deeper. We lived here almost 30 years before ever seeing an elk on the place, but in 2020 the Archie Creek fire burned 131,580 acres just to the east and that seemed to have moved the elk down onto the ranches in the valley. Now in addition to a healthy deer population we are competing with them for grazing. The temperatures are projected to drop back into the low 30's at night and maybe hit low 50's in the day next week. Very depressing.
