Day #73. August 30, 2017

We came in late to Aspenglen from our encounter with mother moose and her offspring. Another great National Park Service campground. This morning, after breakfast we returned to Sheep Lake and traveled through Endo Valley, demarked by 13,075-foot Mount Chiquita to the north, 11,620-foot Sundance Mountain to the south and numerous other surrounding high mountains. The valley’s lower portion is an alluvial fan of the Fall River, an area of sediment deposit (alluvium) left behind as the river spills out into an area of less relief. In the distant past during a time when the adjacent mountains were even higher the ‘river’ was a river of ice, a glacier, that had long since retreated and left behind moraines of unconsolidated debris in distinct forms.

Very soon the valley treated us to an impressive herd of fifty to seventy waapiti. Mostly females and a few big bucks, moving up the valley. A magnificent and sublime sight indeed.

Endo Valley

We drove further up Endo Valley and enjoyed this spectacular glaciated terrain. Then turned east and drove into Estes Park to visit the Red Rose Rock Shop, https://www.facebook.com/pg/redroserockshop/about/. One of the best I have seen. We spoke to a young lady whose father had uprooted his family from Elkins, West Virginia twenty-five years ago so he could fish in the cold, clear Colorado mountain waters. Emily bought two crystalline ‘eggs’.

From Estes Park we continued east on route #34 through the Roosevelt National Forest and the twenty-five-mile-long Big Thompson River Canyon, the same Big Thompson whose headwaters we had crossed just yesterday much higher up in the park. What a canyon! Six-hundred-foot-high, steep-walled cliffs and boulder-strewn banks. In July 1976, a 20-foot wall of water carrying trees, boulders, cars, and houses careened unchecked down the canyon. That deluge killed one hundred forty-four people.

Eastward onward through Fort Collins then to Eaton, CO where we checked into the Cobblestone Inn. Drove through the Pawnee National Grasslands where we saw pronghorn antelope. The Cobblestone didn’t suit our sophisticated taste, so we went back to Fort Collins and checked into a La Quinta where we took long overdue baths and did four loads of pungent, malodorous laundry.

Fun and games tomorrow with Emily’s old friend, Margo and her husband Bob in Fort Collins.

Namaste.  

Day #72. August 29, 2017

We camped at Timber Creek Campground inside the western edge of Rocky Mount National Park just east of 12,397-foot Baker Mountain, one of at least three twelve thousand footers just outside the park in the Arapaho National Forest. Very nice campsite. Typical of the National Park Service. Well maintained, clean and safe. Park Service staff are always cheerful, courteous and helpful.

Emily went to wash her coffee cup and saw a mouse in the woman’s restroom. EEK! It reminded her of our great mouse caper adventure on Vancouver Island. We are little sensitive about mice taking up residence in the van. But what you going to do? Mice need a place to live too. And when some doped out human invades their territory driving a 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan obviously designed for low income mouse community housing and loaded with a million pounds (to a mouse) of nutritious, filling, carbo loaded food…..well?


View from Timber Creek Campground in Rocky Mountain National Park

After breakfast, including the all-important two cups of freshly French press brewed coffee and a little lounging time, we got an early start and headed north on Route 34 (Trail Ridge Road) which generally traverses the park east to west. From the camp ground at seven thousand feet the road wanders through the lowest elevations in the park, a montane forest ecosystem of Douglas fir, lodgepole and Ponderosa pine forest and crosses cold, crystal clear, meandering rivers. Here deep, rich soils and relatively abundant moisture supports quaking aspen, willows, grey alder and water birch groves. During the summer, wildflowers and nutritious native grasses grow in open meadows and valleys. These kinds of areas in the park are prime elk habitat, which is exactly what we saw not long after leaving the camp ground. Elk that is. Lots of them. Twenty-five or thirty in four groupings. Big males (bulls) overseeing the operation. A couple of twelve pointers. A few younger males with velvety, moss soft, just-getting-started antlers. Cows closely guarding first year calves. All most beautiful, decked out with dark brown manes, light-brown bodies and white rumps which characterize both sexes. The older bulls are magnificent. Their racks (antlers) must have been at least four feet wide, maybe five. “How the heck do they even hold their heads up?”, exclaimed Captain Emily, upon our first sighting.


What the Hell Are You Looking At?

A most pleasing start to a great day of exploring this magnificent American national park.

Sidebar. Europeans bestowed the name elk to this North American animal because its size reminded them of the European moose. Moose and elk are both in the deer family. So, the term elk when used in Europe refers to a moose. but when used in America it refers to the lovely animals we are seeing here, a different deer species, in a different subfamily from the moose. Somewhat of a misnomer then. First Nation’s people named this North American deer species first, long before Europeans got here, calling it waapiti, an Algonquian word thought to derive from the Shawnee/Cree language groups. The word waapiti, referring in part to the species’ white rump, has been Americanized (Canadianized actually) over time to wapiti. I would make the case, as many First Nation’s people and many wildlife managers in both Canada and America have, that we should call this magnificent deer species waapiti. That name rolls of the tongue nicely I think. The word elk does not roll off my tongue. It feels more like I’m spitting something out. So, the next time you have occasion to see an elk, call it a waapiti and see if that word doesn’t work better for you.

Of course, First Nation’s people were hunting and naming North American animals long before Europeans arrived. In those days, waapiti roamed freely throughout the continent and especially in native tall grass prairies where they always had plenty to eat. Now remnant herds are relegated to national parks, national monuments and other protected and semi-protected areas and their numbers are substantially reduced from historical levels. An off repeated story with different animals as actors.

Soon after our waapiti encounter we saw a few western marmots. We have the eastern marmot in Virginia of course, which we refer to as a groundhog, or the whistle pig, a name I much prefer. That sure evokes a particular image does it not?

Onward and now upward we drive on road #34 to Lulu City, which is not in any measure a city but a place on the map where one encounters a series of tight switchbacks in the road that dictate a substantial rise in altitude to nine thousand feet where suddenly we find ourselves in a subalpine forest of fir and Engelman spruce. Lodgepole pines and huckleberries occur in previous burn areas. We see Clark's nutcrackers, Steller's jays and mountain chickadees.

At Eleven thousand feet just as suddenly we break out above the tree line and just like that we are on the roof of the park in alpine tundra where plant growth is limited because of cold and strong winds. We are treated to spectacular vistas, a grand landscape of precipitous voids, glaciers, cirque lakes and rock, rock, rock everywhere. The exposed backbone of the top of Rockies.


The Roof of the Park.

Eight hundred Foot Magma Wall



View From Above

Glaciated granite and other metamorphic rock with bastion-like walls of magma, speaking of ancient lava flows, now uplifted to these tremendous altitudes. Precipitation is high here and soils thin. Plant life is limited to dwarfed perennials and non-flowering lichens and mosses. Grasses and sedges are common where tundra soil is well-developed, which is not in many places. The name of the game is rock and snow. Well, not much snow this year, which has been exceptionally warm and dry. Damn that global warming. Plant communities here are a fragile. Footsteps can destroy tundra plants and it may take hundreds of years to recover.

We saw waapiti, big horn sheep and pikas.


Frolicking Pikas

The pika, sometimes called conies or rock rabbits, is a small mammal in fact related to rabbits and just happens to be one of the cutest animals on the planet. It is remarkable that this diminutive, six-inch long, cuddly-looking character lives in one of America’s harshest climates. And they are well adapted to it, with thick brown-gray peppered fur coats, sharp curved claws and padded toes to scamper around alpine rocks and excellent hearing and vision to keep them aware of danger. They live in rock faces, talus slopes, and cliffs near mountain meadows, in colonies often connected by burrow mazes underneath these rocky areas. Pikas do not hibernate, so they farm for a living, gathering large quantities of plants in their mouths and scurrying back to designated storage areas called "haystacks" to let the plants dry. When winter arrives, pikas bring all of their haystacks into their dens and will remain in the burrows most of the winter.

Pika can survive the super harsh alpine tundra climate with long sub-zero winters, and attacks by eagles, hawks, ospreys, falcons, kestrels, vultures and badgers and marmots, but like many other animals and plants, the pika’s greatest challenge, according to scientists and park natural resource managers, will most likely be climate change. Pikas cannot tolerate high temperatures for more than a few hours. As the climate warm, higher average temperatures in alpine tundra regions will force pikas higher up the mountains. You can only go so high before you run out of mountain. Lucky for us that we have a science denying, national monument destroying, non-reading, cheeseburger eating, pussy grabbing, golf playing, fake news promoting, self-possessed, profanity spouting, rabble rousing, bankrupting, colluding, justice obstructing orange haired big nuclear button, super smart genius in the Whitehouse these days to protect the poor pikas from global warming.

Let me be clear, which is what we do in our society when we are not ‘doubling down’ or ‘conflating’ or ‘pivoting’ or listening to ‘breaking news’ or ‘ground-breaking’, or ‘edge cutting’, or ‘being authentic’, or ‘circling back’, or ‘drilling down’ or ‘un-packing’, or ‘game-changing’ or ‘thinking out of the box’, or ‘going forward’, I most certainly lifted lots of information about these animals for this blog entry from Wikipedia.

Ever onward we travel 34, crossing the continental divide at Milner Pass (10,758 feet), passing Specimen Mountain (12,489 feet) to Medicine Bow Curve where we ascend to the highest point on the road at 12,183 feet, past Lava Cliffs, Iceberg Pass and the Rock Cut with the headwaters of the Big Thompson River to the south below us crashing through Forest Canyon and the summit of Sundance Mountain (12,466 feet) just to the north. At Rainbow Curve we start a long descent with harrowing switchbacks, passing Hidden Valley, Beaver Ponds, West Horse Shoe Park, Sheep Lakes and finally pull into the Aspenglen Camp Ground in the park, our refuge for the night. Same deal. Chirpy, cheerful rangers, clean facilities, campsites with water, firepits, bear boxes. What else could a cheap, crusty curmudgeon camper want.


Alpine Tundra at Twelve Thousand Feet

In the evening we rode out to Sheep Lake for some potential wildlife viewing. We got our chairs and spotting scope all set up and, seemingly on cue, were treated to a front row seat visit to the lake by a marvelous mother moose and her calf, a splendid pair indeed. They plunged into the lake’s icy waters and, after checking us out briefly to ascertain that we were not were packing heat, begin feeding on artisan, organic, natural-sun-raised, preservative-antibiotic-gluten free Rocky Mountain National Park gourmet submerged aquatic salad, garnished with all manner of stonefly, mayfly, caddisfly, dragonfly larvae, water fleas, fairy shrimps, tadpole shrimps and ostracods to add a slightly but ever so delicate gritty and peppery taste. 

Moose are the largest members of the deer family. Your average sized female moose weighs somewhere on the order of six to eight hundred pounds. Lots of that is thick, sinewy, powerful muscle they use to carry themselves along gracefully, and quickly if need be, in water and on land. And who couldn’t love that vacuum cleaner muzzle? The males go eight to thirteen hundred pounds and have antlers that can grow to six feet from tip to tip. Guess that pretty much squashes any argument that vegetarianism leads to ninety-pound weakling status.

After eating their fill these wondrous animals emerged from the lake, shook off gallons of water, took a bow, performed a little romping about encore, took another bow and trotted off to other moose adventures.

All in all, a pretty good start to our visit to Rocky Mountain National Park.

Momma Moose and Baby Moose Having Dinner

Back to Asplenglen for the night for us, to debate whether we should follow protocol and put our food in the bear box. Emily is for it. I'm for attracting bears. She won that one.

Sleep tight all you moose heads out there.

More Scenes from Today


Rocky Mountain Backbone

A Cirque Lake One Thousand Feet Below

Rock, Rock, Rock