***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
But now we get down to Earth:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
For our final visit to Rocky Mountain National Park during this trip, we entered from the west side, via Grand Lake.\u00a0 Thereafter, the road goes almost unfailingly northward for a long distance, up along the wonderfully named Never Summer Mountains to the west.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that I was previously aware \u2014 certainly I didn\u2019t remember \u2014 that the Never Summers are volcanic in origin and relatively recent (which is to say, about 29 million years old).\u00a0 They are, thus, quite unrelated to the major mountains of the park that lie to their east (which contain rocks in the range of 1.6 billion to 1.8 billion years of age).\u00a0 We headed up to the Alpine Visitor Center and a bit beyond, continuing to the furthest point along the magnificent Trail Ridge Road that we had reached (coming from the east side) a couple of days before.\u00a0 (We even, as it happened, turned around at exactly the same spot where we had turned around previously.). The views were, of course, glorious.\u00a0 We were up somewhere around 12,000 feet above sea level or a bit higher, I believe.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Oddly, we never did see any bighorn sheep during our visits.\u00a0 And we saw no bears.\u00a0 (I never seriously anticipated that we would.). On the other hand, today was a fairly good day for other<\/em> wildlife.\u00a0 We saw a few isolated deer, scores of elk, and two moose, all pretty close at hand.\u00a0 We saw one group of four quite large bull elk \u2014 six-pointers, so far as we and others there could tell \u2014 at a bit of a distance just above the continental divide at Milner Pass.\u00a0 As an unexpected bonus, I also caught a glimpse of a red fox very near to where we\u2019ve been staying here in Breckenridge.\u00a0 It\u2019s been good to be (way) out of the house.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Breckenridge, Colorado<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 First, I share some news from outer space: \u00a0 \u201cRock from Mars heads home after 600,000 year odyssey across space: Tiny piece of meteorite from London\u2019s Natural History Museum will be used by rover exploring red planet\u201d \u00a0 \u201cThis is the first picture of a sunlike star with multiple exoplanets: Unlike our solar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14162,10615,14159,14153,14156,9934,14150,3712,14165,13886,4606,5054,13889],"class_list":["post-86995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bighorn","tag-colorado","tag-deer","tag-elk","tag-moose","tag-mountains","tag-never-summer","tag-rock","tag-rocky-mountain","tag-rocky-mountain-national-park","tag-sheep","tag-stone","tag-trail-ridge-road"],"yoast_head":"\n
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