Intrusion 07/22/20

Elk Meadow Lodge & RV Resort, Estes Park, Colorado

When a country is rebellious, it has many rulers, but a man of understanding and knowledge maintains order.  ~ Proverbs 28:2

We took it easy today.  A 30-mile drive with a few stops along the way, and a trip into Estes Park for dinner, a walk along the river, and more t-shirt hunting, although we didn’t know we were shirt hunting.  That was an accident.  So was the wildlife encounter. 😊

But let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?

Since we weren’t planning on doing any hiking today, I decided to wear sandals, but just in case, I brought my tennis shoes along for the ride.  My feet were thrilled to not be bound up in shoes and socks, so they weren’t too thrilled when I had to switch early on in today’s adventure.  When I die, please don’t bury me in shoes!  I want to run barefoot all over Heaven!

We’d been wanting to check out “the beaver ponds” that we’d heard were at the National Park, so we used our pass to enter and drove to where we thought the pull-out was.  There were no signs up, and it wasn’t long before we discovered why, and also why no one else was there.  Apparently, the beavers have skipped town.  Everything was all grown up, and all you could see was a trickle of water and the very short boardwalk.  Ah, well.

Our next venture was a little more successful.  Continuing our drive into the Park, we made a quick stop at the viewing place for Horseshoe Park . . . . .

. . . . . . and then on to try to locate the large waterfall I’d seen near the start of the Old Fall River Road.  We drove all the way down the paved road to the start of Fall River, and somehow missed it, so we turned around and tried once again. 

This stop didn’t have any markers either, and yet lots of people seemed to have found it.  It turned out to be a site the National Park Service has been working on every since the Flood of 1982.  It’s also the place where it was necessary to don my shoes.  They seem to be making some progress, but then we don’t know what all was involved to make it a nearly 40-year project.  After something that catastrophic, they most likely had to wait for the ground to settle.  There’s a lot to be said about this, so I made another Special Edition that follows this post.  Interesting place!

For many years, we’ve owned a book called “The Most Scenic Drives In America” by Reader’s Digest.  So what?, you’re probably wondering.  That book has come in handy a lot, because not only does it list 120 different drives, covering all 50 states, it lists points of interest along the way.  There’s one we decided to drive half of today.  The other half we’ll do in a week or so from a future destination.  So with list in hand, we left the Park. 

Turned out though, the first stop was another section of the national Park, just south of town.  It was called Lily Lake.  Nice little place to stroll around.

Just up the road, we discovered the Long’s Peak Trailhead, with a short drive.  We thought we’d check it out, just in case we could see the peak, maybe walk a short distance up a trail, but there were more cars here than we’ve seen anywhere!  We were shocked because the hike to the top is a 15-hour round trip, very strenuous hike!  Maybe people just walk a short distance up?  I don’t know, but there were too many cars here to even count.  We didn’t even stop the Jeep.

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On the way to our next stop, we came across something unexpected.  A building that reminded us of a castle.  We had no idea what it was, and there were no signs, but there was a parking area and three people sitting out by the road painting it, so we asked the first woman what it was.  Turned out to be a Catholic Church.  No services, but it was open to the public, so we went to check it out.

It was mid-morning snack time (a habit left over from Blaine’s work days 😊), so we started searching the roadside for a place to stop, and found one by a river.  There was a group of guys there getting ready to climb a mountain – – I mean really climb, not hike.  One guy told us to come back in about 2 hours and they’d be halfway up, so we filed that in the back of our minds.

Our last planned stop was to be at Brainard Lake in the Roosevelt National Forest.  Unfortunately, they too had timed entrances, and a very long wait to get through the entrance, even if you have a pass.  We found a parking lot near the entrance and got out to stretch our legs, but we didn’t see or do anything.

Since we hadn’t done anything but drive down the road, we were a little early to check out the climbers, but we stopped alongside the road to look for them anyway.  And lo and behold, there they were!  Check out the orange dots I put on the picture.  Each one is a climber.  😊

On the way back, we made an unplanned stop to check out the National Park’s Water Basin area.  We needed our daily Park pass in order to enter, so once again, it was good we had it with us.  There’s a waterfall you could drive a ways to, then park and walk to – the upper and lower Copeland Falls.  So we did just that!  It was worth wearing my shoes for.  😊

Time for Estes Park and the river walk.  It’s a really nice thing they did, and the walk along the river reminded us of the one in San Antonio, although we thought the Texas one was a bit more scenic.  Still, it’s not every town that boasts a river walk.  The other thing of note, is the cleanliness of this town.  Everything seems to be neat and tidy and there are flowers everywhere.  They even paint their transformers in interesting and beautiful ways!

We stopped at a riverside bench along the way to look for a place to eat.  You’d think in a town like this it would be easy to come up with something, but either they received not so favorable reviews, or they had food we weren’t interested in, or they didn’t have outdoor seating.  We finally settled on sandwiches (even though we were hoping for an actual meal like fresh trout our something) at a place called Wapiti.  Excellent reviews, and it was close by, which was important for our protesting empty stomachs.  The place didn’t disappoint!  Unfortunately, we were so hungry, we totally forgot to take a picture of what we ordered – Reuben and onion rings for Blaine, and a French dip and slaw for me.

Now we’ve got really full bellies, so we went back to walking again, but only back to the Jeep.  The town was starting to get crowded for the evening, so we headed back towards home.

However.

As we drove by one of the town squares, we noticed people lining the sidewalk.  Do you remember what that means?  Yep.  Critters are close by.  And sure enough, we spotted elk lounging on the grass.  We’d seen plenty of elk by then, but this was a unique situation, so Blaine turned around at the first opportunity and drove back to our abandoned parking spot which was still empty, and we walked over to see what was happening.  Unbelievably, these huge cows and their calves were just lying there in the grass, looking around at everyone as people gawked and cars zoomed by!  There are a bunch of pictures, none of which I’m apologizing for.  It was quite something to see!  A cop showed up to make sure people were respecting the elk’s space.  One teenage boy and presumably his mother did NOT, and the cop had to call them back and talk to them.  That was just before we arrived on the scene. 

And then two of the elk that were still standing (they all got up when the kid and mom walked up to them), and one walked over, stuck her head over the fence and began chomping on the flowers!  Soon a leg joined the head, then two legs, and before long, her entire body was over the fence enjoying the lovely snack!  Seeing that, another elk joined in the feast, but this one only leaned its head over.  Before long, the one inside, decided she’d lay down to feast.  Right in the middle of the flowers!  And that’s about the time the wildlife preserve guys showed up and shooed her out, and additional cops showed up to shoo the people back. 

And with that, several of the remaining elk decided it was a good idea to walk through traffic.  I mean, they are bigger than the cars, after all. . . . It was pretty obvious that the locals were used to the elk roaming the streets, because they didn’t even seem to slow down much.  The tourists on the other hand slowed and had family members hanging out the windows frantically snapping pictures.

There were flowers in another little section, and a couple of the elk who were already in the street decided those also looked good enough to eat.  At this point, the original cop was the only law enforcement left, and he happened to be standing near us, so we asked him if this is a daily occurrence.  He said, “Yes, but not this particular spot.”  He also told us that the town is committed to the preservation of wildlife, so the critters pretty much go wherever they want and do whatever they want, but they try to keep them out of the main downtown area.  He also mentioned that they also try to keep them out of the flower beds, because the city spent $6,000 this year in flowers.  Yikes!

Such an interesting and unique end to our visit to Rocky Mountain National Park area!

But God wasn’t done surprising us just yet.  There’s a building where we parked the Jeep, but we hadn’t really paid much attention to it.  But once we left the elk encounter (they’d parked themselves in rest mode once again), we decided to go inside and see what was there.  It turned out to be a Christian establishment that sold t-shirts!  And different ones than we’d seen in the main touristy section of town!  We ended up purchasing three – a regular and long-sleeved one for Blaine and a regular one for me.  How do we know it’s Christian?  Several of their shirts had verses or religious sayings on them (like “It is well with my soul” – unfortunately, not in my size), and they also had scripture framed and displayed about the store.

Tomorrow we move and Blaine says we’ll be down for 4 days, but I won’t hold my breath.  When I asked him what we’ll do for four days, he said, “I don’t know . . . play games?  Watch movies? . . .”  Do you see us doing that?  I’ll be happy with one down day.  😊