Elk Bugle's and Cloudcroft New Mexico

 Yes i know its a bad photo. If your read on there's a story behind it.

I went to Cloudcroft Last Sunday with a couple of other students in my digital photography class. The first challenge was getting up at 4:45 so we could try to get there to catch the Elk and get some shots of them, our main goal for going at such an ungodly hour. I am not a morning person so this was a major hurdle, but I set the alarm on my phone and was able to get going and out the door by 5:15.

I knew the elk would not have cameras so there was no need for makeup or doing my hair....however I failed to remember my photography friends would have cameras and are quite sneaky at taking photos of each other when were not looking. I'm not much of one for really being concerned about the makeup and hair anyways but when i realized one of my friends was using a candid photo of me to turn in for her assignment i was thinking, hummmm maybe i should have at least warmed up the hair straightener.  Oh well guess theirs a lot to be said for the all natural look, lol, and it was not worth giving up that 15 more minutes of sleep.


When we got up the mountain it was still to dark to take photos without flash but we did sit and listen to the elk bugle for about 20min. That in itself was all worth the early hour. The sound just cut through the darkness and me with a feeling I can not describe well enough. I am not sure hunters listen with the same ear as I was listening with that morning because there is no way I could kill an animal that stirred such raw emotional feelings in me. I could feel the sound go threw the core of my body and stir up something i have never felt before. I am an animal lover maybe that gives me a different perspective. I will never forget that experience.

We were able to catch sight of several elk that morning but soon realized we needed to re-think our strategy if we were ever going to get decent pictures of them. Now i have been up in those mountains several times but for some reason we saw more wildlife that day than i had ever seen in all my excursions up there. We spotted the largest red tail hawk i had ever seen, herds of deer and elk, a flock of wild turkeys along with the pigs, cows and horses. It was all so amazing.

We did make a lot of stops and went off side roads to get some good shots of an old run down house that was still furnished and the beauty that mother nature was providing us that day. We also got some odd looks from passers by. I'm sure they were wondering what the heck we were doing. We must have been quite a sight, 3 women all with cameras crawling around taking photos of tree roots and such. I did manage to get a blurry photo of an elk, my one trophy for the day even if i can never print it.

We all soon realized how tough wildlife can be to photo and that we all need telephoto lenses. Even so i must have taken over 900 photos that day...not all great mind you. I did have to delete a few of them. It's so easy to get carried away with a digital camera. So ill give one to the morning people of this world, sometimes it is worth getting up before the crack of dawn to experience and amazing day.