Many of the park’s finest grasses may be found in the mountains, for while the grasslands blend into the woodlands somewhere around 1,700 meters (5,500 feet), the grasses continue all the way up to the mountaintops. Again, the species change with climate, altitude, and ground cover conditions. The beautiful bull muhly favors north-facing slopes, and, growing in clumps up to just over a meter (4 feet) high, it helps hold soil on the hillsides. With its large purple flowering heads, it makes a good bedding grass for deer. So does the golden thread-leaf stipa that likes to grow under juniper trees, spilling its long blades in rounded clumps. Since the return of the grasses the mountains and foothills both support a fascinating host of grassland animals. Some, like the yellownosed cotton rat, have come back with the grass. Many of these grassland creatures are abroad at night and are best seen at dawn and dusk. Even after dark you may see a great deal of life along the highway. The 16-kilometer (10-mile) stretch between park headquarters and the Basin may bring startling glimpses of grassland activity within reach of your headlights: a great horned owl with its catlike face and “ears,” sitting still as a sphinx in the middle of the road; a coyote pair gamboling like shepherd pups, their paired eyes flashing white and bright as automobile headlights. These carnivores have come to hunt the rats and rabbits making a mad dash across the road. Arthropods and snakes come to the pavement to warm themselves. The diamond sparkles that litter the blacktop may be reflections from spiders’ eyes. You see a blood-red coal of fire spring to one side at the edge of the road and then as abruptly as a UFO leap 3 meters (10 feet) straight-up into the air. A ringtail climbing a tree perhaps? Or a poor-will taking flight? A flash of pink lights at elbow and shoulder height turns out to be a mule deer and fawn. Stop, turn off your own lights, and look and listen and you will behold a world as it must have been a long time ago, singing in the silence underneath the stars. Bandits and Revolutionaries