This morning I ran over a skiff of snow under a full moon high in the western sky, the sun not yet risen. In the forest, I dodged puddles, their frosted surfaces barely distinguishable in lingering darkness caught beneath boughs of hemlocks, spruces, and pines.

In mid-May, when Vilis and I spent a week in the Rockies, lingering snow and ice from the heaviest snowpack in years in Banff and Jasper National Parks prevented us from hiking trails in the high country. Nonetheless, we explored river valley trails and hills and observed a satisfying abundance of wildlife. Most striking were the hoofed mammals, particularly in view of the fact that we’d recently returned from a year in Australia, where the only hoofed mammals are introduced species. Down Under, the dominant native grazing and browsing mammals are kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, koalas, and other marsupial species, as well as rodents.

In the national parks, we spotted bighorn rams foraging alongside highways and hiked past ewes grazing on grassy hilltops. We scanned cliffs for mountain goats, saw them as white blobs on impossibly steep rock faces, and observed two goats resting on bluffs overlooking valleys. Elk grazed and rested in grassy meadows on the outskirts of Jasper, and we drove past a massive bull feeding at the roadside. We spotted foraging mule deer and a white-tailed deer while hiking a Maligne Canyon trail outside Jasper. The three hoofed mammals of the Alberta Rockies we didn’t see were moose, bison, and caribou.

Black and grizzly bears were out from hibernation, but we saw none, although sections of the Athabasca River valley near Jasper were closed to visitors because of the large number of bears. We saw nary a single meat-eater, but did observe red squirrels chattering in conifers, a least chipmunk skittering into ground cover, Columbian ground squirrels alert beside their burrows, and golden-mantled ground squirrels sunning on barren, sun-warmed slopes in the midst of otherwise snowy landscapes. All in all, the Rockies gave us a lot of mammalian bang for our buck.