Rocky Mountain National Park

A few weekends ago we took a little road trip to the Rocky Mountain National Park to check it out.  It's a spectacular park with beautiful views and lots of wildlife.  It's also home to Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuously paved road in the world.  We only saw a little piece of the park the day we went.  We plan to go back in the spring and hike into the woods a little to see some of the falls and streams.   The park is only about an hour from Denver and is a great day trip.  We'll take you there after we take you to Red Rocks.  Don't worry, we'll pick up some bottled O2 for you!

This picture was taken from the highest point on Trail Ridge Road at 12,183 feet.  You can't really see it, but we were IN the clouds.

Forest Canyon scenic overlook a little lower down at about 11,000 feet.

 
Next we stopped at Many Parks Curve. That's Shawn heading toward the aspen trees around the bend.

The view from Many Parks Curve.  The little yellow patch in the middle of the picture is a stand of aspens.  Hard to tell in the picture but they are BRIGHT yellow.  Can you see the brown trees mixed in with the green ones?  Colorado has a really bad bark beetle problem that's wiping out the pines.  Some people are saying that the mountains will have NO TREES within the next 10 years because of the bark beetles.  Dats sad. 

Try to ignore the funny-looking lady with the weird hair...just enjoy the trees and mountains.

Nice, huh?

Hmmm...scat.  All you scatologists out there know this belongs to...

...these ladies.  And these ladies belong to...

...this big fella.  The elk bucks travel with harems of lady elk and they are extremely protective of their ladies.  This guy was giving me the "you gettin a little too close to my girls" stink eye.  We happened to visit the park during elk bugling season.  That's when you can hear the elk buck calling out to the ladies, encouraging them to come join his harem or something like that.  We could hear them all over the park.  I thought they sounded kinda like whales.

Bear Lake with a lovely stand of aspens

We certainly came across some photogenic critters, check out this dude posing on a rock.  He looks like a chipmunk but he's actually a yellow-mantled squirrel and so cute!

Here's Shawn in front of some more aspens at Bear Lake.  He's almost as cute as that squirrel!