Ant Flats Road is open!

Ant Flats Road is open!  Yesterday afternoon we made our first drive on the road to Ant Flats, which starts at the end of the road to Hardware Ranch.  This (very nice) dirt road was a haunt of ours last summer and fall, because of all the wildlife we routinely saw there.  The road is closed to cars all winter (it becomes a groomed snowmobile road), but reopened yesterday – and we were one of the first to drive it.

We had the road to ourselves for about 90 minutes, and we saw a lot of wildlife.  The standout was several large groups of deer, numbering well over 100 in total (we really didn't even try to count them, there were so many).  We saw one large group of elk, about a half mile south of Hardware Ranch.  Best of all: we saw one bald eagle feeding on a ridge top, and a pair of bald eagles wheeling overhead.

The water in the stream (the headwaters for Blacksmith Fork) were fairly high, because of the runoff and melt.  The Wasatch Mountain drainages are running well in general; the water forecasts for spring are all looking very good.  We were at Porcupine Reservoir twice in the past 10 days, and it had risen at least 6 feet between our two visits.  I don't think we're going to have water challenges this year...