Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Rocky Mountain National Park: Part 2

In between our ventures to higher alpine elevation along the Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain national Park we stayed in lower elevations for one day and hiked around Grand Lake and Kawuneeche Valley.

The girls picked up a junior ranger booklet and had many different activities to complete in order to receive a badge. We decided to take a hike towards the "Never Summer" Wilderness and Bowen Gulch.

 
The view to the north looked promising but the view south concerned us for rain. 

Overcast skies and mild weather was perfect for the walk and we spent most of the afternoon seeing only a handful of other people.



  
The girls worked hard to find the wildflowers in their booklet on our walk.

The junior ranger booklet was a challenge for all of us, as I know almost nothing about plants and trees.  The girls thought it was a good idea to take pictures of the items, in case we could find a ranger to identify the flowers for us.  Soon they were using my phone to document all they saw.

  

 

 

Sometimes my phone actually focuses ...... like narrow-leaf paintbrush top right.....

  

...... other times my phone ignores the desired items like the Colorado Columbine below.

The attention to flowers only lasted so long however, and Christine captured this photo below.  The girls belly laughed showing us their "flower" selfie.



 Dark-eyed Junco
Christine found this young Dark-eyed Junco about the same time as capturing the girls above.

1 comment:

Cindy Gold said...

That location might need to be on our family get together list in a couple year from now. Looks lovely, flowers of photos are fun but you already identified one of the only ones I knew. So glad you guys have raised such knowledge, information sponge daughters.