LANDER - Wyoming Game & Fish officials confirmed Friday that a dozen elk were killed by a lightning strike sometime over the past week in the Squaw Creek drainage above Lander.

Kent Schmidlin, game district supervisor, said he and Bob Trebelcock four-wheeled up to a timbered area at 9,500-feet, where they found the dead elk.

The two officials quickly determined from burnt and singed hair on two-thirds of the animals, that they'd been struck by lightning.

Monsoonal thunderstorms have been boiling up over the Wind River Mountains this week, dumping rain over much of Fremont County.

Schmidlin said he'd gone up prepared to investigate the deaths, keeping in mind other elk deaths from eating poisonous lichen or getting shot by poachers.

The Game & Fish officers counted six adult cows, four yearling cows and three calves in the area - 10 of them in a fairly close grouping.

"We're figuring it happened sometime in the past week," Schmidlin said. Most of the elk carcasses were intact save for some signs of avian scavenging, he said. Two of the dead elk had apparently been discovered by black bears and possibly coyotes, Schmidlin added.

"This sort of thing happens in the high country," Schmidlin said. He said a review of Game & Fish reports showed that eight bighorn rams were killed by lightning on Whiskey Mountain near Dubois in the late 1950s. The biggest lightning-strike kill was in the 1990s, when 20 elk were killed in the Greys River drainage near Afton.

Because the dead elk weren't near any water bodies, they'll be left to predators and scavengers in the Wind River Mountains, he said.

"The bear sign we saw indicated a recent diet of berries," Schmidlin said.

"I think that diet will shift over to elk pretty quickly."

Lander resident John Hughes said he'd spotted the dead elk while on a Thursday trip up to Pete's Lake for some fishing. He saw one downed elk from the jeep road he was driving on, then walked in to investigate.