Words and Photos by Volunteer, Ana Li Gresham
My husband and I had the unbelievable experience of camping by a Cascade red fox den and watching a mama fox and a kit playing, snuggling, and hanging out for a whole evening and morning! It was something right out of a National Geographic special and we felt so lucky and privileged to witness such a magical wildlife moment.
It started with our ‘new usual’, looking for fox scat on a hiking trail. We had volunteer-hiked last summer for Cascades Carnivore Project and had a great experience and learned a lot! This was our first trip of the summer up to the Cascade high country near Mt. Adams and we were excited to get started scat collecting for the second year. As we reached about 6000’ high on the trail the signs of foxes began. Being the one year “scat veterans” that we now are, we were pretty sure we found two fox scats — one on snow and one on a rock— both looking fresh and we categorized them both Q1. As a sidenote and joke, we’ve started rating other things in our life as “Q1” or “Q2” and so on — definitely only funny to the scat collecting community haha.
We continued up, got some stunning views, but eventually a steep snowfield made us turn around. As we looked for a place to camp, I found another fox scat to collect, this one a little older, Q3. Taking this as a good sign that we might see a fox that night we settled in. Just as we finished setting up our tent a fox popped its head up in the boulder field below us, about 200 yards away! We unfortunately didn’t bring our binoculars or the zoom lens for my camera — we have learned our lesson here! We both thought, boy Cascade red foxes are a lot smaller than we thought… then the mama fox came back and we realized that the first fox we saw was a kit! We sat and watched them for hours that evening.
The mama fox would check on the kit about every 45 minutes to an hour and then wander off, probably to go hunting we thought. The kit would wander in and around the boulders and would find a spot in the sun to wait. It would spin in a circle, lie down, sigh and put its head on its paws or its tail — the cutest thing ever! When the mama came back the kit was so excited! It would run over to her across a small snowfield, and they would play a bit, or maybe more accurately the kit would try and play and the mama would put up with it for a while… a relatable scene for mothers everywhere we thought lol. They both seemed calm in the rock field, but every time they crossed the snowfield they would run as fast as they could! We thought maybe this was a survival instinct because they were so much more visible on the snow with the high contrast of dark shapes on a light background.
Because the kit had a dark patch of fur on its forehead, and it was so fast, running and playing around, we named it Blaze. The mama we named Flare because she was so dark in the center of her body, but she had a golden halo of fur on the edge of her, seen when she was looking right at us.
They would hang out for a bit, maybe 15-20 mins and then the Mama would head out to hunt again. We stayed out and watched the foxes for as long as we could, even bringing our sleeping bags out as lap blankets when it got cold. Eventually it started to drizzle on us, and we finally had to call it a night.
We didn’t really expect to see the foxes again in the morning. We thought they would have moved on in the night, but then the kit popped its head back up from the boulder field! We were sure we had found their den at that point! The kit was a little slower in the morning, there was less zipping around. It was mostly curled up on a sunny rock. We were packing up camp when the mama fox came back. We walked very slowly, and they just watched us curiously. I snapped some photos of this incredible sight and thought to myself, “Is this really happening?!”
We didn’t stay in the den area to look for more scats or the den entrance, we didn’t want to disturb them any more than we already had. Down the trail in the next mile, we found 2 more fresh scats to collect making the trip’s total 5.
This was just the most incredible wildlife experience that either of us has ever had, and I couldn’t wait to share the news with the Cascades Carnivore Project crew! They were all super excited and couldn’t wait to get out there and learn more. We found a special place with a fox family, and hopefully the data collected from this site will help all of the Cascade red foxes left in the wild.