It never ceases to amaze me how quickly so many animals weighing in anywhere between 300 and 600 pounds apiece can move through heavy timber without so much as a twig snap. David Copperfield could take lessons from elk when it comes to the art of disappearing. I must admit though that the sight of so many elk in one place was more than a bit encouraging after having been skunked the previous year. Walt and I concluded that the episode had probably cleared out any elk we might have hoped to find in this area, so we quietly walked back to the truck to check out another area nearby that had proven to hold elk in years past. This second trek was infinitely more like the one that I had originally envisioned as we trudged uphill through pasture after pasture of waist high skunk cabbage in full bloom.
Skunk cabbage is Colorado's answer to kudzu.
Kudzu, the devil's revenge on the South, is a plant introduced into the southern states from Europe some time ago for reasons unbeknownst to me, as a fix for some agricultural anomaly that has since ceased to exist. But the kudzu is still around. All I recall is that Kudzu grows like wildfire, exceeding a foot a day. It covers anything in its path and is a real pain in the backside to pass through. So is skunk cabbage.