The second day was easily our best and most exciting day! We had a good walk around Sprague Lake after eating breakfast there, we like to get up super early to go animal sightseeing! Tuesday was the day it paid off the greatest because after we left Sprague and headed back down the mountain towards the valley we were very fortunate to see our first bear in Rocky after looking for the 11+ years that Dave and I have been together!!! The pics below are of the lake and right after those are our BEAR! It's still amazing to us that we finally got to see a bear and I'm sure Dave is glad that I will no longer be skeptical that we will find one. I can't even believe I'm the one who spotted him, poor Dave thought I was seeing a rock at first but once it clicked how crazy I was going and shaking and then he spotted it, he knew that at least that craziness was warranted!
A deer right by the road and this pic was taken without using the zoom!
The one on the right is of Hallet Peak and Flattop Mountain
Chipmunk and one of a few duck families we saw around the lake.
Boys throwing rocks to scare the fishes and I hate spiders yet couldn't help taking its picture.
Carter and I waiting for Dave and Brendan to be done in the bathroom so we could drive on somewhere else. They had perfect timing or we may not have been able to see this cute black bear after our visit to the lake!
Here he is our beautiful first bear sighting in Rocky!
Below, these pictures are of the west side of the park and why Dave was the exhausted one the second night since he drove a lot that day. We were hoping to see one of our moose which live on the west side, we barely missed a baby according to some rangers we saw on the road. But that's okay since we've seen them before and got to see a BEAR! Okay, I am still very excited about that, can you tell?! ;) Sadly our visit to the west side brought us close to tears, okay maybe not Dave so much as me. As you can tell a LOT of the trees are brown and red as they have been taken over by the pine beetle and are killing a great number of pines very fast. According to the ranger talk/skit we went to the second night thankfully there is hope and the park will eventually become a more Aspen dominant park again drastically changing its landscape for our kids and grandkids! We just hope we are fortunate enough to have long lives and are able to see this beautiful change. The next pics are of Timber Creek Campground which has been shut down so that they can chop down all the affected trees and this was the most disheartening for us to see since it was by far the best campground in our opinion. This was the first place we brought Brendan to camp when he was 18 months old and also the place we chose to camp one night when we didn't have the kiddos almost two years ago.
These pictures below are of our trip in Sept. '07 when the boys spent a weekend with Nana and Papo. I put them up for you to compare what it looked like and how dense it was almost two years ago and help you see why we are so sad this is happening. We had the most southern spot in the campground and as you can see with the picture of Dave how far the walk was to our former white van and how dense this place really was! We will truly miss this campground!
So all in all even with some annoying whining from the boys on occasion especially the last morning, we all enjoyed ourselves greatly! Thank goodness we all love being outdoors!
No comments:
Post a Comment