A Drive Through Rocky Mountain National Park

It's June. Although we are not suffering from many heat waves around the country, there are not many places where we can drive to a snow field.




Unless you are in Colorado. Last week it was Pike's Peak with two feet of new snow, and today it was the Rocky Mountain National Park. 

We are staying at the Riverview RV Park in Loveland, which is about 26 miles from the entrance to the National Park.

When we left in the morning, the sky was clear blue with just a few little puffy clouds. The picture above was taken at the park entrance. 

The scenery throughout the park was breathtaking. As I look through the many pictures we took today, of course no single image fully captures the vastness and variety of the views.

I have always been fascinated by the shadows cast by individual clouds.  The cloud above cast the shadow in the image below it.

The road through the park was smooth and easy to drive. Although there were many cars at every pull-out and parking lot, it was possible to find a place to park at most of them. 

Sometimes it is helpful to put a person in a picture to show "scale". I think we saw at least a half dozen people posing with the roadside snow.  

The edge of the tree line.

The top of the Rockies.

The elk are up in the high country for the summer. We saw a couple of herds of all female and calves peacefully grazing in the large Alpine meadows. The bull elk hang out in smaller groups. The bull above is still growing his antlers for the year and is still losing his heavy winter coat. [From Craig] The one above really needed a visit to the elk groomer.

We spotted these bighorn sheep right at the parking area for the station called "Sheep Lakes". They are much lighter in color than other bighorns we have seen in the wild and in wildlife parks. We wondered if other bighorn sheep tell "blonde" jokes about them.

The one above is a much younger male. I guess no one has told him it is time to take his winter coat off. Still fluffy.

All in all I think we were lucky to have such a beautiful day for this drive. Rain in the high country is in the forecast for the rest of the week. We plan on exploring a couple of Loveland places before we move on.

Tomorrows plan is to hike in the Devil's Backbone area and also go to a sculpture garden. Hope it doesn't rain.