Winter ranges along the east benches in Salt Lake and Utah counties "are pretty much shot," said Bill Christensen, regional director for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, a sportsmen's group that promotes habitat conservation and restoration as well as hunting.

"The summer range is fine, but that, of course, is not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is how much food you can eat in the winter. That's what limits population.

"In my opinion, we're setting ourselves up for another disaster like we've seen every 10 years when (animal) populations increase and we don't have the winter range; we have a bad winter and they crash."

Whether the house-covered foothills will ever be suitable winter feeding ground again remains to be seen.

"That's the million-dollar question," Christensen said. "Is it too late?"

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has practically given up trying to restore lost habitat along the Wasatch Front. It prefers to spend its reclamation dollars at higher elevations where it has a chance to make a difference. Or as DWR director Kevin Conway said, "Get a bigger bang for its buck."

Wildlife managers on the Wasatch Front spend a good chunk of their time handling close encounters of the animal and human kind.

Elk wander onto busy highways. Deer roam yards looking for ornamental shrubs. In 2001, wildlife officers removed 30 moose that found their way into foothills neighborhoods. Predators like mountains lions often stalk big game into urban areas.

"One of the ways to balance the population with the habitat is hunting," said Kevin Conway, DWR director.

Hunting is a long-established tradition in Utah, though numbers of those toting rifles in the woods have dropped significantly. Twenty years ago, deer hunters numbered nearly 200,000. Recently, the DWR capped permits at 97,000.

The Western Wildlife Federation isn't anti-hunting, says executive director Kirk Robinson. But it does oppose bagging cougars and bears for trophies. As top-tier predators are killed, Robinson said, mid-level predators proliferate, throwing the food chain out of whack.

Robinson frets that the Wasatch Mountains aren't as wild as they once were. Grizzly bears no longer roam the mountains, and black bears are few. Cougars and bobcats still slink around, but the Canada lynx isn't to be found. Wolverines, too, apparently have disappeared.

"The Wasatch is too fragmented and abused as well as heavily used for them to find a home here," he said. "But I wouldn't count it out completely. For all I know, there might be a lynx tracking a snowshoe hare in the upper basin of City Creek Canyon right now. And if there is not, well, at least there is a mountain lion stalking a deer and possibly a black bear snuggling up in its den for the winter."

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Coming Wednesday: Deep powder and trout streams.

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E-MAIL: romboy@desnews.com