ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK
I misunderstood the new park rules. A new park rule is that between 9 and 2 the only people who can enter the park are people who have gotten a timed pass in advance and even then you could enter only if you arrived in a narrow window of time. Before and after 9-5 the line of cars would be so long that it would be almost impossible to gain access.
Timed passes were available at 7 p.m. the night before and Maria tried immediately at 7 to get a timed pass, but because of the complexity of the website by the time she got signed in at 7:05 all the passes were gone for the next day. So I thought we were going to miss a trip to the park. But it turned out that when we tried to enter at 7:30 a.m. the car line was only 20 cars long and we got right in.
It was a glorious day with clear skies except for a few floating white clouds.
We started at 7500 feet and climbed and climbed as the pine forested mountains rose higher and higher into black rock faces blanketed with huge white patches of snow. We made two short hikes for a total of about 4 miles, one through the tundra above the tree line and one down through a pine forest to a wide meadow with a stream meandering through. We were looking for elk. We did see a young female beside the road as we entered the park but none up where they were supposed to be. We did see a couple of deer and a very friendly marmot.
But mostly we saw pine and birch forests and then the blue green moss of tundra higher up. I made panorama after panorama and will show some of them here. It was a wonderful but exhausting day.
Back in Estes Park after ten hours in the Rockies we ate dinner in the YMCA cafeteria where there were still a few Woodstock people, which was extremely lucky for me since when Maria, Dick and I went back to the car we had driven high into the Rockies, the car wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t even grunt. Silence. A tow truck came, it wasn’t the battery, the starter was dead and it would take two days to repair. Dick and Maria were going to drive me to the Denver airport in the morning. I went back into the dining room and begged for and received an offer of a drive to the Denver Airport the next morning. Another person offered to drive us to our cabin. After looking at spatial videos for a little while we fell asleep exhausted.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 