Al Thieme, Cascadia Wild!

Al Thieme is an animal tracker, naturalist educator, and executive director for Cascadia Wild!, a conservation and environmental education organization. Currently, he is searching for forest carnivores in Mt. Hood National Forest.

Our quest for tracks this week has been part of the Lynx Tracking Project. With this collaborative effort by Cascadia Wild! and Portland's Metro Parks and Green Spaces, we hope to train volunteers to learn more about forest carnivores in the Mt. Hood National Forest. Volunteers may then be able to participate in a snow-tracking survey to locate tracks of the rare Canadian lynx.

Today, I'm out near Mt. Hood again. The snow cover crunches beneath my feet, as if I'm walking on children's cereal frozen in the 4-degree temperature of the surrounding air. Searching for tracks in these conditions resembles hitchhiking on a road full of family minivans -- parents driving, glossy-eyed and white- knuckled, discreetly choosing to see your haggard visage as something besides a person, perhaps a stop sign. Not much luck finding tracks at this elevation. The snow fell two days ago, and then the sun fried it all day yesterday. Hardened overnight, the crust is too hard to show tracks.

On a hunch, I try the nearby ridge. I climb, groan, moan, and struggle, but the ridge remains indifferent to my advances. Long troughs of snow lie behind me like snakes undulating crazily backward, running to lower ground. The higher elevation holds a reward: Right here, in the middle of the ridge, this same ridge I could have fallen down, I find marten tracks. They seem to have tumbled out of the marten's pocket as it ran away. The animal shifted and dodged across the landscape, carving a sinuous path up and down the steep mountainside. Pine martens, cousins of the weasel and the wolverine, are ferocious predators, and today I am at the whim of this one's route, darting down and then up the mountain searching out holes. I record GPS coordinates as I follow its trail. At one point, it climbed a tree and took a flying leap, leaving a full body cavity imprint in the snow. Wow, it looks like this marten was having fun! At the lower end of its trail, the tracks circle a log many times and then disappear. The tracks from the day before tell me I am near the den site, so I sit waiting as darkness descends, hoping for a glimpse of my friend, the marten.