Try, try again...

For some reason, Blogger isn't responding well. When I try to upload or edit a post, Blogger times out. It took about 50 tries to post those last four posts. Hmmmm. Maybe a problem with such lengthy posts, including so darn many pictures? Capacity city, maybe? Throttling back, perhaps? Anyone else finding it slow going?

Behold, the Rockies!

It is impossible to describe the splendor and majesty of the Rocky Mountains. My camera just doesn't do justice to the awe and inspiration I derive from this place.



Yes, I'm back in Colorado for the annual AIS Educator's conference, and yes, I'm taking a couple of days vacation to renew myself by visiting the Rocky Mountains National Park. And yes, I took all these pictures...


The photos are mine, and not copyrighted. Several readers have commented that they use my pictures as their computer wallpaper. I'm very honored. Below are several more posts from the last 2 days, with lots of pictures.



I took several hikes, and covered about 15 miles or so in the last 2 days. My hotel is in Fort Collins. I drive up to the park -- about an hour and a half each way-- in the morning, and back down again in the evening.




Click on the pictures for bigger versions. The bigger versions are much prettier.

Continue reading. At least a couple more posts below. There's lots of photos down there. Be sure to comment if you like them. Or even if you don't.


See Rock City...

Valderee, Valderaa, ...

I come into the mountains for the solitude: the peace and serenity of being by myself.

Unfortunately, the really spectacular scenery is popular, and attracts the galloping hordes, spoiling my spiritual renewal.

This morning, the Bear Lake parking area, which holds 400 cars, was completely FULL at 8:00 a.m.! What's more, the overflow lot back up the road a mile. holding another 500 cars, was also full!

Okay, Change of Plans. Head somewhere else. Sprague Lake Trail. Nope...Full. Storm Pass Trail. Full. Glacier Falls Trail. Full. Deer Mountain Trail. Full.

Dang. Lots and lots of hikers out today. I hate crowds. Give me solitude. Please.

On the flip side, however, when I do travel down a "crowded" wilderness trail, especially one that goes deep into the backcountry and climbs some real serious elevation changes, I derive some small amount of personal satisfaction from the reactions of those young, spirited hikers I encounter on these trails. They are all in their late teens or early 20's, sporting their cargo shorts with long-sleeve sweatshirts, baseball caps, and their 'hoody' tied around their waists. The girls have their pony tail pulled through the loop at the back of their baseball hats, and the guys usually have not one, but two, of those titanium walking stick things, making them look more like out-of-place skiers.

They take one look at me, and their mouth drops open. Six miles from parking lot, two-thousand-plus vertical feet up from the start of the trail, in the thin mountain air at the 11,000 foot elevation, with my gray hair and my big round belly -- made even more bloated by the fact that I'm drinking copious amounts of water -- and my long Dickies workpants.

"Where did you come from?" "Did you walk all the way up here?" "Is there a shortcut we don't know about?" "Are you going to be okay?" "Can you make it down all right?" "How old are you, anyway?"

Because I take lots of rest breaks, I'm not even winded. I'm actually doing better than many of them! When I return to the parking lot, they're all leaning against their cars, winded and out of breath and complaining about blisters and aching legs and the high altitude and being pooped. The fat ol' gray-haired tortoise enjoys smiling and asking them how they enjoyed the view from the top!

Today I passed six different trails (all with full parking lots) before I finally threw in the towel and decided, what the heck, maybe a long strenuous trail will be less crowded. I drove out to the Moraine parking lot, and started up the Odessa Lake trail. There were several dozen cars in the lot, but the trail is 10 miles, so I figured the people will be spread out.

However, about an hour into that hike, it was suddenly cut short. See the post a couple below for the reason why! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty... nice kitty. Maybe the one and only time of my life, and I don't get a picture. Bummer.

I never found out what happened to the people who owned all those cars.

After returning to my car, I decide that a hike on a crowded trail beats no hike at all. There are so many I've taken that I like, and so many more that I haven't yet tried. I chose the Cub Lake trail, which I've never taken before, and decided to take it all the way up to the Fern Lake trail, and make a big loop. All day hike.

Here is the moraine, the marshy wet area at the foot of the valley and Big Thompson River gorge, at the beginning of the trip. The soil is damp, like walking on a wet sponge. Rich soil. Nice wildflowers.



Into the forest, the trail begins to climb. Up. Way up. Sometimes the trail is easy to follow, like you see here. I always take it slow and easy.


As you get further and further up the trail, you encounter fewer people. The city slickers have given up and tuckered out. A couple of miles out and a thousand feet up, the trail is not as wide or as noticeable, like this one. (A dozen yards further down this one, I ended up taking off my socks and shoes and rolling up my pants legs and fording a bit. Das braun vater ist koldt. They call this Glacier Creek, because it begins as meltwater from several of the glaciers further up the gorge. )


After several miles, sometimes it's downright hard to find where the trail is. "I'm never lost, but the trail sometimes misplaces itself." Can you see the trail in this picture below? (Hint: Look way ahead for the part in the bushes.) It's a good thing I've got a good sense of direction. I wonder how many people get really, really lost out here?



This is Cub Lake, about three hours up the trail from the parking lot. Gorgeous. I waited until most of the people left to take the pictures.


I thought I had seen on the map where the trail made a circle around Cub Lake. The main trail definitely went to the right aroudn the north side of the lake. I took the little side trail to the left, following the south side of the lake.

After a few minutes, however, that trail got sparse, and then finally petered out entirely. Thinking surely there's got a to be a trail here somewhere, I kept pushing on. Finally, I was bushwhacking, climbing over fallen logs, sloshing through sloughs, picking my way through underbrush. I probably should have turned back, but by now, I figured I was halfway around the lake, so I might as well continue on.

It took me a full hour and a half to get around this lake, even though it is probably less than a quarter mile long! When I finally got around the lake and back on the trail, I took off my backpack and checked the map. Nope. No trail on the south side of this lake! I had been thinking about Fern Lake which has a trail encircling it.

Oh, well, I enjoyed the cross-country excursion. Of course, I knew exactly where I was at all times, like I said, the trail just sometimes gets misplaced. I continued on, past Cub Lake, and took this shot looking back. The hole in the clouds made the lighting effect.



I had just passed Cub Lake, and was on my way down on the other side of the ridge, to the Mill Creek Trail intersection, when I met a young couple going up. As they passed, I greeted them, and as is my custom, I encouraged them by saying, "you're almost there, you've got about five more minutes to Cub Lake." They stopped dead in their tracks, and said, "Cub Lake? No, no, no, we're going to Fern Lake."

"Not on this trail, you're not," I replied. "If you were going to Fern Lake, you should have taken the right turn about two miles behind you." I've never been to that intersection, but according to the map, it should have been a right turn. There aren't many overpasses and cloverleaf's at the 11,000 foot elevation in the wilderness.

"What?! No, that can't be right. Let's get out the topo map, I think you're mistaken."

I'm not mistaken.

Sure enough, their map confirmed they had missed their turn-off. They turned around. I gave them a good head start before following them down.

Walking real slow, I make less noise when I'm by myself. I see lots of stuff the twenty-somethings never see. Such as the large wooden sign saying, "Fern Lake, this way, Cub Lake, that way!"

And wildlife. continue on down to my post below for some photos of the wildlife I've taken in the past 2 days.

I encounter lots of rewarding scenery, too, such as this beaver pond.

I sure appreciate my monopod: it's a walking stick with a camera mount on the top. I lean the monopod up against a set of rocks or jam it into bushes, and voila, I can take a picture of myself. All of these pictures of me were taken by the timer on the camera.

To give you some sense of how much I hiked today, here is a view looking back towards where I started. Click on this picture below. See the mountain on the right? And see the two mountains in the center? The trail goes down in between the mountain on the right, and the lower mountain in the center, through a gorge. I came up from the trailhead, way way down there. This is real wilderness. This is way up. This is far out. And this is really, really cool.



And here is where I'm going. At the bottom of the mountain cliff in the picture below is a gorge. The trail is way deep down in that gorge, at the very base of that mountain in the distance.


Here I am at the turning around point, at the end of the gorge. This bridge crosses the Big Thompson River, and was built by Youth Conservation Corps volunteers. It took them three summers to build. They had to fell the trees, saw the timber, and put it together out here without power tools. This is a wilderness area, and is at least three miles from the nearest dirt road.

I enjoyed myself. I would have preferred not to have met the dozens of people I met on the trail, but hey, it was fun nevertheless.

Note to self: in the future, when on an all-day hike on the day after eating dinner at the Grumpy Gringo's Mexican restaurant in Estes Park, having Grumpy's Special Enchilada combo with the green sauce... don't forget to put a couple of sheets of toilet paper in the backpack. I didn't need it today, but I can see where it might come in handy on a 10-hour hike in the future. Oh, and extra batteries for the camera, too.

Snow in June?

Yep. Real snow. In the Park, the treeline is about 11, 000 feet. Once you get above this altitude, you leave the subalpine forest and enter the tundra region. The snow begins a little below the treeline in the shady areas and gets more prevalent as you go higher. The remaining snow is sometimes 20 feet deep in places, so just think what it must have been at the end of the winter!


I drove up the Trail Ridge Road to its summit, where the ranger station and summer camp store is located. Notice the elevation here.


Below: Notice the reinforcing logs on the roof, to handle the snow. The ranger said the snow in the winter can be 30 feet deep up here.


I hiked up the trail above the ranger station, another 200 feet or so, to the summit where you get a 360-degree view. This is looking back down at the ranger station from about halfway up. Compare this view with the next photo.

A zoom-in shot of the ranger station from the same spot. Notice the snow bank above the ranger station!


And here I am at the top. Notice the elevation: 2.3 miles above sea level.


On the other side of the mountain, I came across this ranger cabin, still buried in the snow! Notice the roof! The chimney sticks out, and has the ash-catcher on top, since the winds up here can catch a glowing ember and carry it for miles, starting a forest fire down in the dry valleys below. The poles are found on lots of things up here, to tell the rangers where to start digging to find their stuff.


Once the snow melts, you get tundra. What looks like bare rock from down in the valley is actually bare tundra, covered in all kinds of mosses, lichens, and short little grasses and wildflowers! It is gorgeous up here. The photos don't do it justice. I expected at any moment to encounter Julie Andrews singing "the hills are alive..."


Back down on the other side, you get back to the treeline again, around 11, 500 feet.

Wild Critters in the Rockies

I walk slow and easy on the trails. As a result, it takes me twice as long as anyone else to walk a trail. But I see so much more, and get photos of things that most visitors to the park miss.

I don't know what kinds of birds these are, but they were at the 10,000 foot elevation off the Ute Trail.



The chipmunks always wanted a handout, and would come right up to me asking for one. Sorry, I'm a Republican.


According to the displays at the park visitor centers, it is rare to catch sight of the yellow-bellied marmot. But I got to see several, and even got two of them on film, on different days.


This herd of elk was on a high alpine meadow, up above the tree line.






In contrast to the elk, the mule deer are more timid. It took quite a bit of effort to get close enough to one to take this picture. The elk are generally found in the high meadows, but the deer like the cover of the forest.



But here are some elk in the forest.


A real beaver, in the riparian moraine marshes, within sight of his beaver pond.



A stellar's jay, with a grub in his mouth. This shot was taken about the 10,500 foot elevation, near the beaver's pond.



This cute fellow is known as a pica. He's a tiny critter between the size of a chipmunk and a squirrel, but lives the life of a prairie dog, living in burrows dug in sandy soil. The pica and the elk are pretty much the only animals that live above the treeline consistently.




I thought this was a turkey, but a ranger who I met further down the trail and showed her the picture said this was a grouse. She was surprised I got the photo. She said grouse are usually very skittish and are usually gone before anyone can see them.


I'm not sure what kind of bird this is, either, but I think it's some kind of magpie. It's a huge bird, well over a foot long.



Another chipmunk. This one was way up at Cub Lake. He was more timid than most of the chipmunks I saw.




And here's my piece de resistance... this is a ruby-throated hummingbird! It is a female, and thus does not have the ruby throat. It is only about an inch long.
The hummers were flitting around several places in the backcountry. You could hear the trill of their feathers as they flitted to and fro. I consider myself extremely lucky to get this photo: they normally don't alight very often, and when they do, it is only for 1/2 second or so at a time. I never expected to really be able to get a photograph of one, let alone a photo this clear.

That Darned Cat...

After 51 years, I finally got to see my very first mountain lion in the wild today! To get away from the crowds (see posts above), I decided to take a real long trail today, one that went way out, and way up: the Odessa Lake trail. I was planning to take this trail about ten miles, but alas... About two miles out, I heard something hiss. It sounded like an alligator from the Okefenokee. Knowing that alligators aren't found at 10,000 feet in the Rockies, I stopped and looked around. Nothing. I walked about 50 feet further, and definitely heard something hiss, angrily, from the rocky outcropping on my left. I looked, and bingo, about 200 feet away, was this gorgeous, classic, mountain lion's head, complete with dark eye stripes, and scowling look, just barely poking up over some rocks. Before I could reach for my camera (or do anything, for that matter), it was gone. Poof. I had caught a brief, but perfectly clear, peek at the head of a mountain lion in the wild. It was so far away, that even with the telephoto lens, if I had been able to take its picture you would have had to blow the image up to see it. Now, I'm no dummy, in spite off what Dubby and the kids might tell you. I know that mountain lions, along with bears, gators, rattlesnakes, and practically all other predators, have this instinctive recognition that humans are the top tippy top of the food chain, and aren't to be messed with. Most predatory species give wide berth to a human once they recognized one - including mountain lions. So the fact that this one was hissing told me, either (a) it had a litter of young nearby, or (b) it was mentally unstable and was having problems understanding its place relative to mine in the overall scheme of things. In either case, I instantly decided that continuing on this trail was probably not in my best long-term interest at the moment. I waited a few seconds, looking around, hoping to get a photo in case the kitty re-appeared, but then thought better of it, and carefully backed back down the trail. I know enough not to turn my back on a threatening predator. I also extended my monopod walking stick to its longest length... ready to raise it over my head, should the cat reappear close by. (They say that making yourself look huge, by waving your hands over your head, swinging your walking stick over your head, etc. is one way to try to fool an attacker into believing you are more dangerous that you really are. Of course, this bluff may not work 100% of the time, hence I wasn't at all hesitant to back down the trail.) So there you have it. My first encounter with a real live mountain lion, in the wild. It lasted all of maybe 1/2 second, and was so far away, I'm glad I had my glasses on or I may not even have noticed it until too late. My only regret is that I didn't get a picture.

Another State...

Kansas. Well, I'm up to 42 states now. (I've not yet visited Hawaii, Montana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, or the Dakotas.)

Of course, if you use Dubby's criteria of having to spend two nights in a state before counting it, I'll have to subtract out Wyoming, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Rhode Island. And now Kansas.

I flew from the Shenandoah Valley to Denver Sunday, and drove up to Fort Collins. I've got to get accustomed to this altitude before my presentation this Friday, so I had planned to go hiking in the Rockies wilderness. But for some reason, my asthma is acting up. Given my trouble breathing, I decided that going ten miles into the wilderness by myself with asthma in the thin air can wait a day or two.

So instead, I spent the day driving over to Kansas. Nice drive. Flat. Lots of scrubland and rangeland. Mile after mile of it. As I neared the state line, I began to see more oats, wheat, and even some irrigated corn here and there, but generally it was all prairie.



Instead of just stepping across the state line, I drove on over to Goodland, the first real 'town' on Interstate 70. It's a little bigger than Bridgewater, VA, and about the size of Fernandina Beach in Florida.


Nice monument on the courthouse lawn.


Click on this picture, and look at the colorful decoration on the Telephone Building. I'd guess this was built in the 1930's.


Click on this picture for a view of Main Street.


From the one hill I encountered, I took this picture, showing the priarie stretching off into the distance as far as the eye can see... Click on it for some perspective.

I've posted a couple more entries below, too, covering our trip to Florida.