How will public lands fare from this election?

[Mustangs Rule]

Those are some great points! I haven’t spent a ton of time in Wyoming (saving up those pref points!) but I would absolutely be concerned with habitat fragmentation and loss of migration corridors. It’s frustrating and we as hunters and conservationists find ourselves caught between a rock and hard place, as they say.

That terrible winter snow kill in Western Wyoming 2022-2023 was caused by a frigid polar vortex coming south earlier than normal then meeting a huge warm Pacific atmospheric river going east that was later than normal. Then they met over Western Wyoming's high elevation plains. High enough to turn the rain into incredibly deep snow followed by a hard freeze. North and south at lower elevations in both Montana and Colorado, this huge atmospheric river just stayed as rain.

All this has the climate change fingerprint written all over it. What causes a polar vortex is a buildup of excess heat that sits high on top of the arctic and it's high pressure pushes the heavier cold air down south.

So, what causing these huge Atmospheric Rivers? They are not new, there are nine pathways for them, all normally flowing from the warm equator due north to the arctic.

But warming oceans have changed that.

All across the high west we are in a state of Snow Drought. This is caused by warm atmospheric rivers formed in the Northern Pacific Ocean that bring higher than normal temperatures dumping warm rain not snow and melting any snow that might already be there. This has happened before but not to the extreme degree and increased frequency that it is happening now.

The Pacific Ocean is only hotter by a fraction of a degree on the average, but that heat can collect in places like the Northern Pacific, causing ocean temps there to increase by as much as 7 or 8 degrees which is HUGE. The evaporation really amps up and creates these huge atmospheric rivers that push warm rain from the Northern Pacific west to east deeper into our mountain west.

So, we do not have snowpack across our western mountains, which is like having a refrigerator without a freezer. Then the High country becomes the dry country when the rain just runs off, and the high mountain meadows are not naturally irrigated all summer by melting snowpack. The nourishing green is gone. No different than if a farmer shut off his irrigation water to his crops.

Then the big game animals leave there for lack of new green forage by mid to late summer and most are gone well ahead of our fall hunting seasons.

Normal is gone in more ways than one. This lack of steady oxygen rich cold-water flowing into our salmon and trout streams is terrible for fish too.

I keep reading about hunters blaming predators for this lack of deer and elk up high during fall hunting season, but the real big game changer is climate change.

On my spring through summer hikes, I have been seeing huge sheds of Mountain Goat fur much lower in elevation than ever before, where there is green forage, but also where the wolves, lions coyotes and bears can have such increased advantages.

I sit on my from porch looking at a wall of mountains that rise near straight up to10,000 feet in elevation with a 60 x Spotting scope. I am watching high up at what should be snowfields, but it is all brown, rocks and dirt. I can see how dry and barren the high country is.

This lack of green irrigated by melting snow that is not there, is really hard on Mountain Goats and wild Bighorn sheep.

Last summer I watched Mountain Goats going lower than before, same for bighorn sheep.

So, when they go lower and leave those high pinnacles and slick rock sanctuaries where they can see predators easier and have the advantage of higher positions, more get killed by predators.

These extra losses are due to climate change. It is so obvious bearing witness to all these once rare but now common unnatural factors playing out like a bad roll of dice and wildlife and habitat loss. What we are looking at is just another example of critical habitat degradation caused by excess burning fossil fuels, which creates a hotter climate and the result is habitat can no longer support wildlife as it once did.

These are huge new systemic problems, which cause loss of habit and extreme mortality which we can never "predator hunt" our way out of. That is an old tool, but these are new and repeating problems.