Fogged Over In Hibbing

So of all places I get to write this blog... I'm stuck in the Hibbing airport waiting for a taxi to come pick us up and DRIVE us to Thief River Falls. Oh yeah, it's 10 minutes past midnight right now. So let's do the math, the taxi should be here by 12:30am and we should arrive in TRF at about 4am. So far Delta hasn't been able to do anything for me. They think their taxi-ing me in the fog at 45 mph is complementary. Haha. Anyway, I might as well update this blog with the most recent happenings.

First of all, I took all my cameras down before I took off to Covenant Midwinter Conference in Chicago last friday. I got a few pictures the same bald bucks, a few new ones, but nothing that was too noteworthy. Just more wolves.

The best thing I get to write about is that after the Youth Workers Connection (Fri-Sun) I had to transfer from the Hyatt downtown out to the Hyatt O'hare, still in town, but by the river. Two years ago I took a walk one afternoon north of the hotel up the river bank. I went under a bridge and stumbled across about 8 deer including one decent shed buck. This got me fired up to find his antlers. I looked and looked, but there were also boot track in there. No antlers.

This year, I glanced at GoogleEarth before I transfered hotels and once I was checked in to the O'hare, I decided I should try to take a nap. I just about fell asleep, but I just couldn't. I don't know why. Anyway, I got up and decided I would take my walk then. I grabbed my hat and gloves and headed out of the east parking lot. The riverbank is probably about 100 yards wide at this point. As I went south, there were places where it pinched and there were some small drainages flowing from the streets into the river. Once I got past the biggest pinch (one that pushed me up on the street), it opened up to quite a stretch of woods. I dipped back into the woods and saw a few openings and sure enough there were beds and lots of fresh tracks. I circled around and followed the most tracks I could and the closer to these apartment buildings I got, the heavier the tracks got, it was weird. I angled back towards the main road running south and kept it to my right so I could comb the area on the way back. That's when I kicked up my first deer. It didn't seem too spooked, so I kind of followed where it was headed. I started to see more and more deer. Pretty soon I was in a little honey hole. Deer were jumping and walking everywhere. There must've been at least 20 deer in a 50 yard area. None were carrying that I could see. Soon enough I saw a shed buck and he was limping. His left front knee was broken and healed over. I slowed way down after I saw that buck. The tracks were thick. I scanned as best as I could and then after about five minutes I saw my first antler to my right - points down. Would've been not too hard to miss. So this corridor that I was walking through, was about 100 yards wide at the most between the road and a grassy opening. My goal was to walk close to the highway to make sure I didn't miss anything to my right. Sure enough that's where this antler was - about 50 ft from the sidewalk under some willows. The shed ended up scoring 63 5/8", which would've made him roughly gross 145". I'm pretty sure he was a four year old. There were a decent amount of people tracks on some of the walking trails, probably out walking their dogs. I put my money on that somebody else already found the other side.

We also got hit by a "record" snowstorm on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday so that pretty much shut down looking any more. We received around 20" of snow and had 45 mph winds.