Sept 15 Sept 22 Oct 1 Oct 6 Oct 20 Oct 27 Nov 3 Nov 17 Nov 23	Wednesday, September 22 We’ve informally dubbed Wednesdays as AARP hiking days, especially since school has started. The only people we meet on the trails are others around our age or those that are college aged... So, we took off from here a little after 8am, heading for the east side of Rocky Mountain National Park and the trailhead for Cub Lake. It was not an auspicious start. We promptly got bogged down in rush hour traffic heading for Boulder... We didn’t arrive at the park until about 10. Once we got past Boulder, traffic moved smoothly, but we won’t travel that way at that hour again... The photo on the left shows some aspen trees by the side of the trail. It was an overcast day and rain was threatening. The forecast for Estes Park, just east of the park called for a 30% chance of showers after 3 pm. It lied... The photo on the left shows me near the trailhead, lining up the shot on the right, which looks up the Big Thompson River towards our destination. We got about a mile down the trail when it started sprinkling on us and it was obvious that it was raining ahead of us, so we turned back. It’s a nice trail, however, so we’ll be back. Most of the first mile of the trail edges Moraine Park, a glacier carved valley. The edge was boulder strewn and the rocks there had gouges where the former glaciers had drug rocks over the bedrock. The photo on the left above looks towards the valley where Cub Lake is located. This is the spot where we decided to turn back. The center photo is looking out over Moraine Park. The photo on the right shows Carl looking out over Moraine Park. On the trail, we found a couple of chipmunks that almost insisted they needed their pictures taken. So, they appear here... . . We returned to the car a little before 11 and drove a short distance up the road to where the restrooms were located. As we exited, we noticed a small group of elk lounging near the facilities. A bull and his harem of 6-8 cows. They pretty much ignored the attention they were getting. I sat in the car with the windows rolled down for most of these photos. On our way back to the main road, there was a major traffic jam. Yup. More elk. This was a larger bull and his herd had about 15 in it, including about three yearlings. We’d see two other smaller groupings of elk before reaching the main road through the park. One was a young bull with only a single cow. The other was a cow and calf. Since the weather was so yucky and it was getting close to lunch time, we decided to drive straight to the top of the park to the Alpine Visitor’s Center for lunch. The road construction that we had encountered on our last trip over the top was almost complete, lacking just a small section near the Alpine Center and there was plenty of parking available. As we neared the top, we kept watching the temperature drop. Started out about 58 and dropped 20 degrees before we reached the parking lot. Lunch consisted of a bowl of chili for Carl and a bowl of chicken noodle soup for me. Yum! And we split some chips and a huge chocolate chip cookie. As we sat there, we saw the rain change to snow, then back again a number of times. The look of falling snow is just so much different from falling rain, isn’t it? And the clouds were so low that visibility was about 50 feet. After lunch, we headed back down the mountain, taking a slightly different route back out of the park, then headed home. We were home by a little after 3. And we’ve decided to return to this path and make it all the way to the lake next week! Next...