07/03/2026
Migration tracking week 7 🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌 || Deer 665 migrated 20 miles during the week of May 21-28, leapfrogging from one stopover to another in the Hoback River watershed. Departing from Raspberry Ridge, she trekked past Bondurant, Wyoming and her 2021 birthplace, then across several ridges to another stopover in Little Granite Creek. She ended week seven having migrated for 49 days and traveled 155 miles. She had not given birth to her twin fawns yet. Congratulations to Kent Black and Robby Smith for correctly guessing she would migrate 20 miles in week seven!
Deer 665 began the week at Raspberry Ridge, where she had been stopped over to forage since May 7. After 16 days in this lush patch of habitat, she headed northwest through Hoback Basin on May 23.
On May 24 she came within a half mile of the Bondurant library, and less than 500 feet from a house in a subdivision.
From there she climbed up to a ridge connected to Game Hill, which overlooks the upstream entrance to Hoback Canyon. This is where her mother Deer 512 spent the summer of 2021, and where we presume Deer 665 was born.
On May 25 Deer 665 splashed across Granite Creek, then climbed four miles into a bowl in the headwaters of Little Granite Creek. She stopped over here from May 26-28, ending the seventh week of her journey.
Deer 665 is now in the heart of summer range for mule deer. Thousands of mule deer are scattered in small groups in every tributary to the Hoback River. Many of them have migrated more than 100 miles to get here.
In May, it is easy to spot migrating mule deer by taking a short drive up any side road in Hoback Basin. When you see a melting snowdrift, odds are good that there will be a foraging mule deer within a few hundred yards.
The sagebrush hills of Hoback Basin are also alive with migratory pronghorn feasting on the wave of greenup. Snowcapped peaks of the Gros Ventre Range and Wyoming Range loom in the background. As summer progresses, animals will move higher through the forests on the flanks of the mountains.
For Deer 665 and her herd, these late-spring days are some of the most important foraging days of the entire year. The nutrition she gains now sets her up for a successful summer of raising fawns and surviving the coming winter.
She’s within a week or two of when she usually gives birth, and she’s still some distance from her usual summer range on Teton Pass.
Do you think Deer 665 will hang out longer in Little Granite Creek, or keep pressing on?
Comment your guess on how far she will migrate in week eight: 0, 10, 20, 30 miles or more, and we’ll reveal the answer in our next migration update!
The data for this map is thanks to collaboration between our team at the University of Wyoming and biologists with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Monteith Shop, Bureau of Land Management - Wyoming, and USGS Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units .
Cartography by our Wild Migrations atlas partners at the Department of Geography, University of Oregon InfoGraphics lab, especially Clare Otcasek and Joanna Merson, and WMI’s Ian Freeman.
