Rocky Mountain National Park

This will be a short blog as I think that the pictures speak for themselves – but even pictures cannot do this place justice (at least not the pictures that I take). All of the attached pictures, except for the panorama of Mary's Lake, were taken in Rocky Mountain National Park.

This place is awesome. I know that awesome is way over used these days but, RMNP is Awesome - Awe Inspiring - and Awfully Beautiful. It is way way better than the Grand Canyon in our opinion and ranks right up with Yellowstone for national park beauty.

Besides mountains and snow, we saw several herds of elk, a family of yellow-bellied marmots, numerous waterfalls, and vistas that just take your breath away and make you say "WOW."
The pictures cannot do this place justice. If you ever get a chance to explore this area - do not pass up that chance.

The one sad note in the park is the amount of trees that are dead or dying due to a terrible infestation of pine bark beetles. They are attacking the lodge pole pines and there are places that you look into a valley and the valley will have a red tinge due to this. We saw this last year at Mesa Verde where there were literally no trees left to die – the forests were just lifeless tree trunks. Hopefully it will not get to that point in RMNP.

The highest point on the road through the park is about over 10,000 feet just at 2 miles above sea level. I thought that I would have a bout of altitude sickness problems as we have both had this in the past, but so far other than a slight headache and a little shortness of breath we are fine. Actually, if someone would send me a bottle of Oxygen I would be forever grateful.

The ground squirrels in the campground are driving the dogs nuts.

As always, if you really need a way to kill some time, there is a link on the right side of the blog that will take you to all of our photo albums on Picassa and you can browse through many many photos.