Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Rocky Mountain High—Colorado

Traveling the way we do is not easy.  We fly into a place (in this case, Denver) and then we make a great circle of 1500-2200 miles until we arrive back at our original destination.  This involves a lot of packing and unpacking and changing gears and altitudes—and attitudes!  It also gives us the opportunity to do what we please and follow our own agendas, which also change.  It also keeps us from having hotel reservations when we get some place.

Today we went into Rocky Mountain National Park—just a couple miles from Estes Park--

and drove the Trail Ridge Road, which, we discovered, is one of America’s scenic byways and climbs to over 12,000 feet above sea level!

  When we got to this altitude, we found plants and climatic conditions similar to those at the Arctic Circle and we learned that, for every 1,000 feet we climbed, the temperature dropped 3-5 degrees.  We started out driving through woodlands and moved on to dense forests and then found ourselves in a vast, treeless world that is known as the alpine tundra. 

The scenery on this trail was spectacular, and, once again, we crossed the Continental Divide.

(We have done that in past trips to Glacier and the Canadian Rockies.)  When we were at 12,000 feet, we were slightly unsteady on our feet again and extremely thirsty.  “They” say that dehydration is common in this dry climate and at higher elevations, so we drank lots of water on the way.

One of our favorite things to do when traveling in the wild is looking for wildlife.  I am still on a quest to discover a moose in the wild.  We haven’t even heard about moose in these parts; however, we encountered hundreds of elk,including a number of bulls who bugled while we watched!
  Nature is so amazing—you look at a field or into a forest and all is calm.  You see no animals, and then a rock or a bush starts moving and, suddenly, you discover a whole herd of elk (or deer).  They blend in so well with their habitats and are easy to miss.  We discovered that on our way up Pike’s Peak yesterday.  The mountain goats and marmots blended in with the rocks.

In the town of Estes Park, twice we saw elk wandering across the Big Thompson River (really just a stream in the town) and into people’s yards, nibbling on shrubbery and grass, moving from yard to yard and crossing the streets.