Opinion: The charms of pocket meadows

A few Saturdays ago the Boy and I went up the North Fork and hiked a hike we haven’t hiked in at least 20 years, maybe more.

It’s not a very long hike, but it goes to a nice little pocket meadow, which I define as a small meadow, typically set in the woods, that is 10 acres of less.

This meadow might be a little bit bigger than that, but not much. We hiked through thick lodgepole pine to get there, pines which I could easily see over the last time I hiked it.

Today they’re all about 30 feet tall, give or take, with the odd larch and spruce thrown in for good measure. This is how the woods work around here.

The Red Bench Fire burned through in ’88, the lodgepole took over and slowly, they’ll die out and the longer-lived species, like larch, Doug Fir, Ponderosa and spruce will come in.

It takes a few human generations for this to happen naturally and a low intensity fire helps to thin the doghair pine and the larch move in then.

This has actually happened farther south, like the route to Howe Lake and some other North Fork areas.

But back to meadows.

We hiked to the end of the meadow and then hooked into one of the best elk trails I’ve seen in awhile and kept following, hitting small meadows along the way.

We saw a couple of whitetails and plenty of elk tracks, which I always find interesting in a place where there’s plenty of wolves, bears and lions to eat them.

If the habitat is good, the game does just fine, though a real cool study done years ago found that something like more than 90% of game animals die from some sort of predation in the North Fork. That included human predation.

It was a pretty simple study: They radio collared a bunch of elk and then followed them until they died.

Very few died of old age, but I did manage to get a photo of a collared elk long after the study had ended.

We followed the elk trail for at least a mile and then turned around. It continued on the edge of the woods and the many small meadows we encountered.

My kind of walk as I get older: Flat and interesting, with several bird species and always the thought of running into a griz, even though we saw no bear sign.

It will be fun to return in the spring, when things have greened up and the songbirds have returned.

The elk trail won’t be as evident in the lush of spring. 

But memories of the route will be.