Cross country trip- animals & people in Rocky Mountain NP

On the western side of Rocky Mountain National Park, we drove through the Grand Lake entrance. The ranger her confirmed that the road was still impassable from Milner Pass to Rainbow Curve. Shortly past the gate we were rewarded with the view of several elk in a field, and one that was standing in the road blocking our path up the mountain. This wasn't too big of a deal. We had no problem sitting in the truck and watching as it took it's time crossing the road. As is often our luck, we weren't able to get the camera out quickly enough to catch a better view of the gorgeous animal... only the tail end. Time and again we caught glimpses of the elk. Here are several more pictures. Only once did we get a frontal portrait. Everyone in the truck was happier now and the conversation was flowing much easier because we were going to see most of the park after all. Sure, we were still going to miss the Alpine sections, but at this point we were grateful to have been on both the eastern and western sides of the park! We continued following the road as far as we could. There was very little snow. Nothing at the bottom and not much up high either. At a turn out, we took a picture of the valley we had just traveled through. We tried to figure out which river we were looking at, but didn't have a map with its name on it. I'm sure that someone will supply me with the name, but for now I'm just going to say it was a tributary of the Colorado river, if not that river itself. I'll place another post with the rest of the photos for this section in a minute. (The blogger doesn't seem to want to add any more here. When we got out of the car to take the picture we had a cute little friend who was doing a little more than begging for food. What looked like a chipmunk popped out of the trash can and ran along the stone wall to where we were standing. It then tried to climb into my husband's pocket to look for food. The kids were charmed and wanted to pet it and take it with us. I was busy trying to get the kids back into the car away from the animal. I don't want to encourage my kids to befriend wild animals. It was obvious that this animal had met with people that don't follow that philosophy. I think it is selfish, cruel and dangerous to pet or try to hand feed wild animals. There are extremely few exceptions to this rule and never any exceptions within a National Park. I have a few stories from my park ranger days of what happens when animals and people get too cozy. I'll share them later.
After our close animal encounter, we continued the drive up to Milner Pass. We stopped up there and the kids played in the snow. We took a picture of them in front of the continental divide sign and we talked with a couple of people who noticed our Virginia license plates and stopped to talk. They had lived in Virginia before moving to Colorado and were always interested in talking to people from there. We told them about our military transfer to California and our cross-country drive. They thanked my husband for his service, shook his hand and headed their own way.