There is a sound that comes off the dark mountain in late September that you feel in your sternum before you understand it with your ears. It is the whole reason some of us live here.
By Andre3 min read
If you've never heard a bull elk bugle across a canyon at first light, I'm not sure I can explain what it does to you.
It starts low and rises — a clear, almost impossibly high note for an animal that size, climbing and climbing until it breaks into a string of grunts and chuckles that sound like the mountain itself laughing at you. In the dark before dawn in late September, when the rut is on, you'll hear one bull open up across the drainage and then another answer from the black timber, and another, until the whole basin is ringing with it. It comes up through the cold ground and into your chest. The hair on your arms stands up every single time, no matter how many seasons you've done this.
That sound is the bull advertising and challenging all at once — his fitness, his harem, his willingness to fight — and we get into what each call means elsewhere. But standing in it is a different thing than understanding it. For a few weeks each fall the elk woods are louder and wilder than at any other time of year, and people travel across the country and climb in the dark just to be inside that sound for one morning.
The aspens are gold, the air bites, and the mountain is screaming at the sunrise. That's what September sounds like here. It's the reason some of us never leave.
