More Rocky Mnt Nat'l Park (June 19th)

This is the High Park fire again.  You can see that as the afternoon has gone on the smoke has gotten darker.

On our way back from this hike we spotted an elk walking towards the parking lot/restroom area.

Soon two of her friends joined her.

They walked right down amid all the people and climbed the fence to get down by the bathrooms.

Some people are really not very smart.  Rangers continually had to tell people to stop crowding them and give them space and an open area to get back out into the open.  I had my big zoom lens on to get most of these pictures from far away.  Once the rangers ok'd it we were able to walk down to our car which was actually parked right next to the bathrooms.  So some of the pictures were actually taken out the driver's side window of the car.  The ranger nearest to us said they have never seen the elk come down to the bathrooms like this.  They were clearly getting spooked and with all the people around they were worried something bad would happen.  Every time the rangers got them back up over the top of that fence one of the elk would hop back down and the other two would follow again.

When we drove away all three of them were still down by the building.

Most of what looks like dark clouds in the above picture is actually smoke from the High Park fire.  

We ate dinner at a nice little picnic area part way down the mountain.  This really beautiful bird, which it turns out is called a Stellar's Jay (also known as a Pine Jay or Mountain Jay), kept hanging around the tree behind our picnic table.  It was big, a little bigger than a blue jay, almost the size of a small crow.  As I was looking up what type of bird it was I came across a lot of online stories about people feeding them out of their hands or having them swoop down and steal nuts or food from their picnics. So that explains why he was staying so close!

We came down out of the mountains and back to Estes Park and took Hwy 34 to get back to the interstate (we were staying the night in Cheyenne WY).  Hwy 34 runs through Big Thompson Canyon, along the Big Thompson river and it was beautiful.  It's kind of funny because you come out of the canyon rather abruptly just before Loveland, CO and are very quickly in the lands of cattle, prairie, outlet malls and interstate.