Day 14: The Beauty of the Rockies.

Woke up very groggily this morning in Denver, Colorado.  Wasn’t sure what to expect this morning… the hotel had already deceived us by claiming to have a quality breakfast and then didn’t offer half the things they had boldly advertised.  Example: Posters about fresh-made cinnamon buns in several places.  There were none.   That wasn’t cool with me… but anyway, after that we had our morning meeting.

It’s Sunday and the original plan for our trip is to arrive home in Muncie on Thursday, with some flexibility depending on our budget.  The problem is what the weather patterns are setting up for what we call a “Death Ridge” – a pattern that promotes fair weather and unfavorable conditions for storms.  That ridge looks like it will be hanging around for the next week, making our last chase week to seem rather boring.

Conditions for eastern Montana on Monday still looked somewhat favorable.  We took a vote and decided that we would chase in Montana the next day and then start heading home after that – from where we are now in the country it’s at least a 2-day drive back to Indiana.

However, since we are in Denver now, and we planned to split up the drive to Montana between today and tomorrow, we decided to take advantage of the fact we were near the rockies.  So for today we went to the Rocky Mountain National Park! (Another idea brought up was to visit the Coors brewery, but our professor pretended he didn’t hear that idea.)

For lunch we went to Estes Park in Boulder, CO.  Such a rich place full of culture!  Our assistant professor’s wife lived in Colorado while they were dating, so he knew it would be a great area to stop for lunch.   We found quite a rich culture!  The places was an outdoor pedestrian area, several blocks long,  lined with little boutiques.  Instead of a street between the shops there was a brick sidewalk with tall shade trees, flowers, benches.  But it wasn’t just an outdoor mall… nearly all the businesses were local, gourmet, specialty… and everywhere we walked we heard the sound of some local musician serenading us with his talent.  There were also street performers who did juggled, walked on stilts or performed stunts.  As charmed as I was with the whole place, my main goal was to find a meal that wouldn’t be overpriced (food was expensive) and would satisfy my only somewhat-hungry stomach.  I ended up with a frozen-yogurt strawberry-banana smoothie.  It hit the spot!

After that we headed for the park.  I have never been far enough west to see the Rockie Mountains, so I gazed in awe as the mountains in the distance started getting closer and closer in the window.  Before I knew it we were driving up in the hills, and eventually into the park.  The only mountains I’ve ever seen are the Appalachian Mountains, and the Rockies weren’t like them at all!!

I felt like I was living in a place too good to be true.  Oh, it was so beautiful!  The pine trees, the large rocks, the streams of water flowing down… I normally am not a fan of pine trees, but these were gorgeous.  Oh, I fell in love…  We drove our van through the park and the first thing we saw was a herd of reindeer!  They were HUGE animals!

We parked our vans and started climbing a nature trail.  Our goal was to reach a lake that would give us a great view of the mountains.  On the first part of the trail we saw a herd of caribou too.

My storm chase team!  

View from the bottom of the mountain.

I don’t think I fully understood what I was getting into when I started down that trail. At the beginning of the trail there were just nice dirt paths, with an occasional weathered rock beneath our feet.  However, it started to get more difficult.  About ¾ of a mile in we started walking across uneven rocks, being careful not to slip in my tennis shoes as we stepped between small ground rocks that jutted up over a foot high.  ¾ of the way through the journey to the mountain we actually had to walk UP a creek… a steep creek with flat, slippery rocks… and then after that on unstable bed of rocks to continue up the path.  The path got steeper, more jagged, and the air was thinner with left my heart pounding like a metronome as we stumbled to the top.

I’m not going to lie, that view at the top was worth it. We ended up at a lake where we could just sit and look out at the mountain.  It was gorgeous, so far away from urbanization and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in my life.  

This picture doesn't do near enough justice to how gorgeous this view was.  We could see the top of that mountain in the back, and there were blue skies so bright that the picture just whited it out.  It was absolutely breathtaking though.

Overwhelmed with the beauty, I wanted to cry, and my heart knew that I needed to move out west whenever I had the opportunity.

While I knew that the lake was 2.3 miles away from our starting point, I had assumed that would be a circular path and got confused, thinking that included the way back to the van.  NO.  We walked 2.3 miles just to get TO the lake… I was informed that we had to walk back DOWN the same trail we just walked up.  Oh, I wanted to die…. My body isn’t used to hiking.  In fact, I’ve been sitting in a van for 6+ hours every day, so my body isn’t used to MOVING in general.

Couple of my classmates trying to wade around the flowing stream.

Thankfully the hike down was much quicker on the way up.  I didn’t stop to take pictures, didn’t stop… I was achy, tired, hungry, and on a mission to stop the pain as soon as I possibly could.  About 30-45 minutes later we were at the bottom of the trail, in the van, and on the road again.

While I was on the mountain I saw two birds I’ve never seen before:  the Stellers Jay and the Magpie.  Both birds are native to the Rockies and westward.

Magpie

Stellar's Jay

As I write this I am sitting in the van on the way to Casper, Wyoming.  We are staying at the Hampton Inn tonight, which will be so nice after staying in Motel 8’s.  Tomorrow we will wake up early and head for Montana.  We were actually ahead of the Storm Prediction Center with their forecasting… later this afternoon they too had saw that eastern Montana would be a good place for storms for tomorrow.

 

We shouldn’t have a problem with whether or not these storms fire, like we’ve had the past few days.  Storms definitely will spring up… the issue will be whether or not there are so many that they form an unchasable squall-line.  I guess we’ll just have to see how things go!