"Why don't we do it in the road?"

Afternoon Campers! It's Silver Cliche' here with you and again today from Rocky Mountain National Park near the "kapital of kitsch"... Estes Park, Colorado!

So, I wrote a pictureless blog last night with a promise that if the sun shone today I'd use it's power to rev up the 'ole laptop and add some pics. Well, the batteries held through the night, we didn't freeze our tushies, the sun is shining like it does only above 8,000 feet and (thanks to our two solar panels) we are charging every device in the trailer between now and sundown. Even after that, we have power to spare for the inverter which is powering my laptop for processing pics and blogging. Yeah, sun!

I told you yesterday about Estes Park and how it is in a neck-and-neck race in my book for the phoniest western city we've visited (Jackson, Wyoming still has the lead by a nose... but if you put a clothespin on it to reduce the odor then Estes Park might win). Here are a couple of street scenes from Estes Park. Don't let the beauty in the background distract you. Here in the Park where we are staying you can get the beauty without the tee shirt and taffy shops:

The leading businesses on this faux-western street (there is only one street to speak of in Estes Park) are 1.) tee shirt shops -- the winner by far with at least a dozen in a 2 block stretch 2.) taffy and sweet shops and 3.) places where you and your loved ones can have your portrait taken and printed in sepia tone with everyone dressed as pioneers or miners or convicts and 4.) fly fishing/rock climbing shops. After that come eating establishments, rock shops and new age stores. Totally missing was and sign of tasteful or practical retail aimed at average Americans whose brains still function despite the thin air and constant threat of hypoxia.


I read something in the Rocky Mountain National Park literature which they gave us at the gate that made it clear how and why Estes Park looks and functions the way it does. We are here in the off season. Technically, there are no campgrounds even open yet. That all starts on Memorial Day weekend. However, in the peak season which runs for 6 weeks in the summer there are -- brace yourself -- one million visitors to RMNP. That means 166,666 per week. This is a town with 5,800 year round residents. Let's do the math. If there are 12 tee shirt shops and each visitor buys (on average) one tee shirt then each shop sells 83,000 shirts in just a six week stretch (probably double that for the full year including the shoulder season which we are in), and it appears the average shirt is $20, that means each store owner earns... well... well they earn enough to retire to Florida at age 50 and live comfortably for the rest of their lives. So, like most other things in our country, this place looks and functions the way it does because 1.) the economics drive it that way and 2.) the average American has absolutely no sense whatsoever. As H.L. Mencken said "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public".

Just to show the contrast. That Christmas shop in the pic above was drawing visitors in Estes Park two weeks before the start of the season and seven months before Christmas (this year's big seller seems to be a Christmas ornament featuring Donald Trump with a dialogue bubble that says "You're Fired! Merry Christmas!". Nice, eh? Menchen was right.). In less than ten minutes we reentered the Park. I stopped and took this picture:

Those are elk grazing on a meadow that is just trying to put forward some green shoots of grass. The elk's winter coats are shedding, making them look a bit ragged and homeless. The males are regrowing their antlers and they are covered in fluffy velvet which they will shed once the antlers are full grown and hardened. In the fall they will shed this year's rack and next spring restart the cycle. The pine forests cover the park except where they are pushed aside by aspen. The aspen are just leafing in a rich shade of light green that even Crayola never quite captured even in the giant 128-crayon box. (It's somewhere between "inchworm" and "light chrome green"... seriously... look it up) The contrast between what nature builds and what man builds is as striking here as it is where people built Jackson, Wyoming next to the Grand Teton's. Menchen!

One disadvantage of the off season is that some parts of the park are not open. Specifically, the "Trail Ridge Road" which is billed as the highest continuously paved road in the USA. I'd love to have driven it. We've been over 11,000 on numerous occasions. Trail Ridge Road is over 12,000. The older road that parallels it is only open about 6 weeks in the summer (probably the same 6 that draws the 1,000,000 people). It is a one way route from bottom to top where it joins the newer ridge road. I'm sure if you google "Rocky mountain national park trail ridge road" you'll see the pictures that we won't get to take on this trip.

So, I hear you ask "If that's the disadvantage, Silver Cliche', is there an advantage?". I'm glad you asked. There certainly is! This morning, Mrs. C' and I arose as we usually do before the chickens. No, there are not actually chickens here. It's an expression. Kind of like that line from Irving Berlin's song "Oh how I hate to get up in the morning" about life in the Army in which is says "...and then I'll get that other pup, the guy who wakes the bugler up". That's us, the guys who wake the bugler up. Anyway... the advantages... and sorry for the string of quotes... I think my brain may be misfiring on all cylinders from oxygen deprivation after a week in Colorado... either that or second hand marijuana smoke on the freeways. The advantages... after a cup of coffee we tossed on our warm garb, stepped out to find heavy frost on everything. The kind of frost that has to be scraped from windshields... except we are Floridians and don't own an ice scraper. Our approach is to turn on the truck with the seat heaters and defrosters on full and go back into the warm trailer for 10 minutes. Bingo! As we pulled out of our campsite at 6:01 AM (quiet time ends at 6:00) we noticed that many of our neighbors in tents had abandoned their "rustic shelter" in favor of their "automobile". Seriously. I haven't see so many people sleeping in cars since the Daytona 500 or the NBC evening news after the last recession. So, we headed off to explore the park as the sun was hitting the high peaks. Did we see 166,666 people? No. 1,666? No. 166? No. We saw approximately 16 people. That, boys and girls, is the advantage of being here now. We felt like we had all 265,000 acres to ourselves.

We drove around for about two hours. We saw elk galore. There are so many elk in the park that I tough of calling my broker and shouting "place a short on elk meat... there is so much supply the price must be about to plummet!" until I realized that elk are protected in the park and their vast numbers will never drive down the price of elk sausage, burgers or jerky (all of which are available in Estes Park along with various other elk, bison and bear products, presumably including taffy and, in some form, tee shirts). We also saw magpies, robins and more wild turkey than you would see at the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota.

At one point on the trip to Bear Lake (more on that in a minute), we came around a hairpin corner and saw something of a commotion in the road about 1/4 mile ahead. 1/4 mile happens to be just far enough away that I couldn't distinguish a strolling zombie from a fallen rock even with my new bifocals. I said to Mrs. C' "looks like we've got a critter in the road... maybe a bear cub or something". She focused with the same lack of precision in her visual field that I have and we started trading views of what we might be looking at. "Bear cub?", "an elk laying down.. maybe hurt?" "should we call the park rangers?" "that looks like feathers... is it a vulture disassembling some road kill?" "Wait, that's not an animal, it's two animals" "are those wild turkeys?" At about that time the two turkeys that had been frolicking in the middle of the road started to walk away separately. The female looked sheepish. The male ruffed his ample tail feathers and looked at me with a hard stare that formed perfect interspecies communication "Thanks a lot, buddy". We tried to capture the moment through the truck's windshield, but even if the picture had turned out we couldn't have shared it here since we like to keep this blog "family friendly".

So, we made it to Bear Lake and I hiked on snow (literally) to the frozen lake to capture this picture for you:

As we headed back to the trailer for more coffee and some flapjacks we took innumerable pictures. I could have chosen any of a half dozen single frames or panoramas for you, but the one that looked to me the most like what I saw as we toured the empty park just after daybreak was this one:

Let me close out with a pic of where we are as I write. This is our spot in Aspenglen campground near the eastern edge of the park where it's 70 degrees (at this altitude 70 feels more like 80) with sunshine that embraces every living plant an animal and a light breeze. The sound of snow runoff flowing down the creek next to us is the dominant background noise. Something with a fragrance like jasmine is blooming nearby although I don't know what it is. Either that or some camper is burning whatever they've got including dryer sheets to shake the cold from last night. And you thought blogging was hard work. Ha! I only make it look hard.

That's it for today campers. Not sure what tomorrow holds. We expect to stay here both tonight and tomorrow night and head out and into Nebraska on Sunday.

Later...

SC'