Sugar Maples

Let's play word association, shall we?

Vermont.

Who said maple syrup? 

I did. 

A couple months ago I hadn't thought about Vermont as a vacation destination in...well, forever. When it started to be a serious candidate as a substitute for a scuttled trip to Maine (which replaced Costa Rica), the first thing that came to my mind about that state was pouring sweet maple syrup on a pile of fluffy pancakes. Now that I know a little more about the Green Mountain State based on a half week doing a little exploring and a lot more time than that researching where to go and what to do, maple syrup is still the first thing I think of when I hear the name Vermont.

Call it fate, karma, destiny, kismet, divine providence or whatever else you might want to call it but I was not getting out of Vermont without a little maple syrup experience. Maybe even more than a little.

Where to begin? New England Maple Museum? Sure, we went there. Local diner for those fluffy pancakes I talked about in the big paragraph above? Thanks, Henry's Diner in Burlington. But for the real scoop on maple syrup, we opted to pay a visit to a farm where this stuff is actually made and talk to someone who puts in the time all year long. That meant time in the sugar house, a walk in the woods and whatever else we could find on property. 

A quick internet search, some website checking out, a few eliminations and we settled on Baird Farm about an hour and a half north of Bennington. We kept a couple of alternates on our agenda in case Baird didn't pan out. We didn't even think about stopping anywhere else once we finished our time there.

Let's start with the basics. Maple syrup comes from maple trees. Specifically the sap of those maples, which from about late February to mid-April (depending on the year and the climate) can be extracted from the maples while the temperatures swing between freezing and thawing. This freeze-thaw action builds up pressure within the trees which allows easy extraction by simply sticking a tap into the trunk of the tree and letting the sap flow out. Easy enough? Good!

Now, traditionally, the tap inserted into the tree was a metal apparatus with a spout on the non-tree end and a hook for a metal bucket. Stick the bucket on the hook, wait for it to fill with sap, go collect all your buckets, process the sap and voila!...maple syrup.

That process may work fine for a small at-home operation or maybe even a larger commercial farm some decades ago. But harvesting today likely looks like a series of taps in trees connected to tubes connected to larger tubes going into a sugar house to get the 1.5% to 2% sugar content sap up to the 66.9% sugar content syrup so you can enjoy your pancakes or waffles or French toast in the proper way. Not too complicated, right? 

Those are the basics.

Today's tapping hardware.

Baird Farm was established by the current Baird family 102 years ago. The extended family can actually claim that the farm has been in the fam longer than 102 years but the current ownership goes back four generations to 1918 when the ancestors of today's Bairds purchased the property from an aunt. The farm today consists of the 65 acre farm proper with a couple of forests adding about 170 acres to the total operation. The extra land holds the maples. All 12,000 of them in two separate but about equal 6,000 tree sections.

With 12,000 trees on the property contributing to the harvest, there are no buckets attached to trees at Baird Farm. Try about 80 miles of tubing of various sizes delivering all that slightly sweet sap down to two pump houses at the lower portion of the property where it's collected into a tank before being pumped back up to the sugar house. The sap flows by gravity but is also pulled by vacuum down to the pump house to speed up the whole operation.

Twenty some years ago, the sugar house was the first and last stop after the pump house, where the sap (which is mostly water) would be boiled down to the required thickness and sugar content under the watchful eye of an experienced syrup maker, who could often tell when the syrup was ready for bottling by watching the way it ran off a spoon. But about the turn of the last century, the Bairds picked up a reverse osmosis machine which fairly quickly extracts some of the water in the sap to increase the overall sugar content from 2% or less up to 18%. Saves a ton of time apparently.

The sugar house is the next and final stop, consisting of a couple of 7,000 to 8,000 gallon holding tanks which feed into the evaporator where the final reduction is made. Today the final product is checked not by eye and the rolling-off-the-spoon check but with a hygrometer to ensure a more consistent product. The evaporator today also comes with an on-off switch rather than being wood-fired, which is a whole lot more effective at halting the cooking off process when it's either at the right sugar level or when a group of tourists like us interrupts production asking for a tour and tasting.

For the record, we did not halt any kind of production. We're months away from that.

The stainless steel holding tanks.

The evaporator, turning sap into syrup.

So how much sap goes into making a gallon of syrup? About 45-55 gallons of sap per gallon of maple syrup is the answer. The annual yield from the farm is about 6,000 gallons, or about 1/2 gallon per tree. To get 6,000 gallons, you need to extract and boil down about 300,000 gallons of sap. That's a lot of boiling down in the evaporator, even after the reverse osmosis machine (which sounds like some science fiction movie invention every time I write that). And it all has to be supervised. Think you put in overtime at work? It's not uncommon to shut operations down in the hot sugarhouse at midnight or 1 a.m. Heck, there might even be the odd 4 a.m. night every so often.

And since we are on the subject of work...each one of those 12,000 trees are tapped by hand every year and the taps are pulled within 30 days of the end of extraction. It's cold in Vermont. That sometimes means deep snow and snowshoes to get that job done. Depending on the conditions, upwards of 300 to 400 taps can be placed in a single day. And not just anywhere. Once a tap is placed the tree is scarred in that spot and you'll need to pick a different spot so the trunk can recover.

Slice out of a maple tree showing the scars of past tappings.

One of the two pump houses.

How many people are employed at Baird Farm to do all this? Three. That's it. No joke. Three people do all the tapping, the boiling and the untapping. This is some hard work. And that's just in the production season if things go perfectly, which they don't always do.

Sometimes lines stop producing. Maybe a squirrel chewed through one of the tubes. Or if it's not a squirrel maybe a chipmunk. Or a deer. Or a porcupine!!! Tree falls in the woods? Yikes! How many lines does one of those things take down? Remember, there are 80 miles of tubes. 80 miles!! Now, the drop in pressure can be measured in the pump houses and gauges out on the lines themselves can get pretty close to where the loss in pressure is occurring but that's about as close as instrumentation can get you. The lines need to be walked. In the snow. Maybe with snowshoes. For miles.

If I've made it sound like this is some hard work for only about six weeks a year, I apologize. There's plenty of work in the off season to be done too. Tubing needs to be replaced as frequently as every three years. Not all of it. But enough of the 80 miles to add up to miles and miles of the stuff being changed out each summer. 

And if you are thinking that maybe you can spread out the work by doing some of the tapping in the fall, when the freeze-thaw action is also going on, think again. Sure you could do it that way but there would be more issues with lines freezing and the trees can't produce but once a year so if you missed maximum production you'd lose product.

Who wants to be a maple syrup farmer? My hand is down. I'll just buy the stuff.

Shots of maple syrup, anyone? Yes, please!

Speaking of buying, you can do that at Baird Farm. I'm not going to say that this was the best part of the tour because we got so much great information out of 90 minutes (not a typo) there but the buying certainly was the tastiest part of our visit. Well, until the mint infused maple syrup sampling that is.

Maple syrup is graded by color and taste into one of four categories: Golden Delicate, Amber Rich, Dark Robust and Very Dark Strong. The first word (or words in the case of Very Dark) describes the appearance of the syrup and the second (or third) word describes the flavor. They used to be Fancy, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber and Grade B but everyone wanted the Fancy stuff and nobody wanted Grade B just out of principles of labeling rather than letting their tastebuds be the decider of what they wanted. The color is determined by the timing of the extraction. Sap later in the season is darker than earlier sap.

Our six samples (the photograph above was taken mid-sampling) each covered the four categories plus a shot each of spruce infused and mint infused syrup. The spruce infused was interesting and not entirely unappealing. I hate mint (except in dental products and gum) so that one went unfinished for me despite its already small size. The winners for us in the straight maple? Golden Delicate which was so smooth and light and the Dark Robust, which packed a flavor punch that had some seriousness to it. This is some seriously good stuff. I don't know that I will ever think about maple syrup quite the same way again and for damn sure I'm not ever buying any of the fake stuff ever again.

I'm amazed that we spent an hour and a half on the Baird Farm but there was not a boring nor an uninformative minute. Our guide for the mid-morning was Jenna, daughter of the current Baird Farm owners and partner in the retail business. Jenna is one of those three people tapping her share of 12,000 trees on snowshoes every winter and cooking sap into sugar to all hours of the night and morning and replacing tubing and all other sorts of jobs to keep the place running, including spending time with us one Thursday morning in August. This was probably the most action packed and straight up fun thing we did in our time in Vermont. It was worth every penny of the free tour price plus the money we dropped on swag, including a bottle each of Golden Delicate and Dark Robust.

The sugarhouse at Baird Farm, where it all happens.

I mentioned earlier in this post that I had a backup plan in case our experience at Baird Farm wasn't everything I thought it could be. I wasn't joking; I had two additional maple syrup farms on my agenda that we could have visited in the event we were disappointed. There's no way that was going to happen. The first place we picked was the best I'm sure, even if I didn't get to the other two. Why mess with success?

From start to finish, we spent a bit under four days in Vermont but there was a little more maple-ing than just our visit to Baird Farm that we were able to pack into our time there. I ate maple chipotle beef tacos and a breakfast sandwich with maple bacon (OK, so that last one was at Dunkin'). I also brought back at least two kinds of beer brewed with maple syrup for post-trip enjoyment and of course, I did end up one morning with a stack of pancakes (to go) that I saturated with maple syrup. And I do mean saturated.

We also stopped by the New England Maple Museum, which is about a 10 minute drive west of Baird Farm. We shopped (including our one per trip Christmas tree ornament purchase), took advantage of an available restroom and hung out near the world's largest jug of maple syrup. I don't know if that claim is true but how could we not?

My hunch above about Vermont equaling maple syrup is statistically accurate by the way. While numbers out there seem to differ a little, it appears Vermont far and away produces more maple syrup (over 2 million gallons in a year) than any other state. Its output is about half of that in the entire United States and it easily bests the next five producers combined. 

New York, Maine, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, if you must know. Vermont is best. At least in the maple syrup department.

Mmmmm...pancakes with maple syrup. From Henry's Diner on Bank Street in Burlington.

Proof I was in Vermont.

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How We Did It

Baird Farm is located in the town of North Chittenden, Vermont. They are open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tours are by appointment or chance, according to their website. Email them using the link on their website or just give them a call. Go here. Seriously. It's an amazing tour. Say hi to Jenna from us if you make it there. And ask to see the trees. We didn't, but the tour after us did so we tagged along with them to take a walk in the woods. It was way worth it. The sugar house and even the reverse osmosis tanks are fascinating and all but there's nothing like seeing the forest with tubes hooked up to the trees.

I should also note that Baird is certified organic. Yes, pretty much all wild grown maple trees are organic, but the certification goes into sustainable farming practices right down to the type of cleaner that they use to scrub the evaporator while they are deep into the sugaring process. I don't know if it shows in the taste of their syrup but I do know that stuff is pretty amazing tasting.

If you are looking for some good pancakes, I can recommend Henry's Diner in downtown Burlington. We took our breakfast to go (pandemic, you know) but the atmosphere inside the place is classic old-school diner from all the way back to 1925. I get that it's probably not that difficult to get good pancakes most places in Vermont but the waffle was pretty darned good too. Henry's is located at 155 Bank Street.

If you want to see the world's largest jug of maple syrup, pick up anything maple syrup related ever made or actually see inside the museum itself (which we didn't do), the New England Maple Museum is about a ten minute drive west of Baird Farm in Pittsford, Vermont. It's worth it for the photo opportunity with the big jug.

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Rocky Mountain High

In November of last year, we took a long weekend trip to Colorado. It wasn't a vacation, but we tacked on an extra day to our itinerary to allow us to spend a day seeing something new. That something new was supposed to be Rocky Mountain National Park. Frontier Airlines, however, had other ideas, and in what has to be one of the top two miscommunication experiences I've ever had with an airline, we never made it to our extra day. Rocky Mountain would have to wait. 

So will Frontier for my business any time soon. Possibly forever. 

As it turns out, the Park didn't have to wait long. Less than nine months later, we took in what we missed the first time. And quite honestly, we probably did it way better than we would have done in November. We used Rocky Mountain National Park as our anchor on this trip (and I mean that in only positive terms). It served as a reason to fly into and out of Denver and it ended our trip with what we hoped would be a "saved the best for last" type deal. Our hopes were correct.

Our plan for Rocky Mountain National Park was to start in the southwest corner of the Park near Grand Lake and drive the entirety of the length of Trail Ridge Road through the mountains to over 12,000 feet and end up at Estes Park just outside the northeast corner of the Park. With a few side trips and what we hoped would be many, many stops, we figured that would take us about all day. Now, because we are more than a little obsessed with seeing bighorn sheep in the wild, we planned a second morning in the Park around Bighorn Mountain and Sheep Lakes, hoping that those spots would live up to their names and get us a look at some of these animals just after dawn on the day we flew home.

I don't know what it is about bighorn sheep. I mean they are just sheep with big, curly horns. But there is something there. Maybe my patronus is a bighorn sheep or something.

The Colorado River, Rocky Mountain National Park.

Part of the attraction of Rocky Mountain was the landscape. Being able to drive through those peaks capped with snow while just days earlier having hiked under brutal 100 degree blazing sun was really appealing. I was really looking forward to driving up the side of a mountain likely with a steep drop-off on the side of the unprotected road (that part was true) and seeing for miles and miles over mountains. 

I was also eager to see more of the Colorado River after having driven alongside it and over it and seen it wind its way as far as Canyonlands National Park. I imagined where we'd be driving that the Colorado would be much, much smaller both in width and depth. That part was particularly true. The river in Rocky Mountain looks nothing like it does at Canyonlands. It's peaceful and slow, winding its way through a bucolic setting looking way clearer and fresher than it does downstream. Or downriver I guess.

All of those hopes here came true. The mountains were amazing and seeing the Colorado close to its source knowing what it would be come later was just what I wanted to see. The difference is so striking. It seems so young at its source.

All of that was fine and good and amazing and wonderful and whatever else you can say about that sort of nature. But what we really wanted out of Rocky Mountain was to see some wildlife. And not just some, like a lot. I mean, why not aim high, right? No bison or wolves or grizzlies in the Park but there are black bears, elk, moose and (of course) the coveted bighorn sheep. Our plan was to see all of these "big four" (that's our term, not anything official). No idea how we'd do it except for that whole Bighorn Mountain and Sheep Lakes thing but we were determined to dream here. 

But before we get to all that, let's talk tundra and the rodent "big four" (again, our term). 

One of the biggest surprises for me was that part of Rocky Mountain National Park contains significant areas of alpine tundra, areas above the treeline where the only plant life growing is moss and lichen and smaller greenery. There's no better place to see this sort of an environment in a National Park because you can climb higher (climb here means "drive"; there are actually higher peaks in other parks) in Rocky Mountain than any other Park in the country. And there are a ton of areas that look just like the picture above, barren rocky landscapes with anything that's growing really low to the ground to avoid the wind.

You might think that these areas would be devoid of other life. We were up there in late June and there was still a ton of snow on the ground. You'd be wrong to think that. We found plenty of marmots and pika, two of the four rodents we found in many, many spots while driving around on our day plus there. We saw one or two marmots a couple of years ago up at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon but these fat ground squirrels were all over the tundra area. 

Keep an eye on marmots by the way; apparently they like to eat radiator hoses and wiring in car engines.

Scattered among the marmots were the pika, small rodents that look sort of like a cross between a rabbit and a hamster. Together with the ground squirrels we saw all over the lower elevations (no, it's not a chipmunk...) and the Utah prairie dogs we saw in some of the prairie (duh...) areas, I'm labeling these four rodents as the rodent "big four". They are presented below for your viewing pleasure.

Clockwise from top left: marmot, pika, Utah prairie dog, ground squirrel.

Mountains. River. Rodents. Tundra. All well and good. Let's get to the good stuff. And no need to be coy here but we got good to great looks at every species we hoped to see. Honestly, we really couldn't have hoped for a better wildlife experience at Rocky Mountain, despite how it may have seemed at one or two spots in our drive. This was just an awesome experience. Let's go in the order we saw each species.

Moose

When I wrote earlier in this post that we had no idea how we'd see all the animals we wanted to see, that wasn't quite true. We did have some sort of plan or insider tips for some species. On the moose front, the Park website suggested we look for these big deer along the Colorado River on the west side of the Park. Noted. We also knew that moose are crepuscular, meaning they tend to be active at the beginning of the day and towards the end of the day. We'd need an early start, which is why we chose to stay close to the southwest entrance of the Park. We made it there by just after 6 a.m.

If you drove start to finish at the speed limit through Rocky Mountain National Park I'm guessing you could do the whole thing in about an hour and a half, assuming there were no slower cars on the road holding you up. I'm also pretty certain you wouldn't see much in the way of larger wildlife. You have to get off the main road and search. While we didn't know this for sure when we entered the Park, we guessed pretty quickly and took the first left we saw just a little bit after passing the Grand Lake Entrance Station. We were not the first ones there, although we didn't see anyone looking at the moose lying down in the field to the left of the road as we pulled in.

Yep, that's right. We saw a moose on the first road we took to look for one and we didn't even have to stop the car or anything. We'd stay here for the next half an hour or so. 

There wasn't just one moose either. There were three. Two never stood up in our time there but one (that we are assuming was male) did.

Sometimes nature isn't that exciting. All this moose did was eat and walk. Nothing to get too worked up about maybe. But sometimes nature is exciting enough just being there in front of us and this was probably one of those times. We haven't seen a lot of wild moose in our lives. In fact, I think we'd only ever seen one other moose outside of captivity and that was a female eating by the side of the road in Alaska in 2017. So the three we saw that morning in Rocky Mountain represented a threefold increase over and above the most moose we had seen before and the largest set of antlers we'd ever seen on a wild moose.

Not impressed by the large antlers? I know, they are a work in progress but we were thrilled with this sighting. For about 30 minutes. The moose were near the Colorado, by the way. The picture of the River above was taken maybe 1/4 of a mile from where we spotted our moose.

Moose at Sheep Lakes. Rocky Mountain National Park.

But that wasn't it for the moose in Rocky Mountain National Park for us. We managed to see a fourth (assuming it was not the same moose we saw in the morning) in the opposite corner of the Park later that same day after dinner. Sure enough, it was getting towards night and the moose started moving. 

We got to watch this one drinking and running. I know...thrilling, right. But it was. These things can move fast even though they look like they are just ambling along at a leisurely trot. Long legs cover ground I guess. I am positive this thing could have been on top of us in less than a minute from about a quarter to half mile away. Fortunately, it looked like it was really after water, because it stopped for a drink when it got to the lake before moving along again at a similar clip in a different direction.  By the time that happened, there were other animal sightings afoot that took our attention away from a lone moose drinking and running.

The antlers on the running moose were about the same size as the one we saw in the a.m. so we are still looking for one of these creatures with some massive headgear. Still, four moose in one day? Pretty satisfied here. Long way to go in the future with these beasts I'm hoping.

Elk

For all the National Park visits I've made over the years in this country, I'd only seen one elk in the wild in Yellowstone in 2011. And that was from a long distance. Obviously by the photograph above, we out-did that experience easily on this trip. 

The pro tip from Rocky Mountain National Park for spotting elk was look for them above the treeline (so on the tundra, pretty much) in summer. Didn't work. We looked at a lot of wide open spaces above the treeline in the park and didn't see so much as a single elk out there. We did, however, find elk in a couple of spots where we headed to see other wildlife. 

First of all, our strategy of just taking lefts at every turnout off the main road on the west side of the park like we used to find moose worked equally well for elk. We found two individuals apart from each other but generally off along the line of the woods by stopping at the Coyote Valley Trail and found the group of four above just about a half an hour later at Beaver Creek Picnic Area. Ironically, we saw no coyote at Coyote Valley nor did we see any beaver at Beaver Creek. Or anywhere else in the park for that matter. But elk? Yeah we saw them there, albeit at a pretty good distance away.

It does not take anywhere near a half an hour to get between the two spots discussed above on a straight drive and that's because we got a pretty up close and personal encounter with a group of three elk about 20-25 feet off the side of the road to our right between Coyote Valley and Beaver Creek.

This group of three (two of which are shown above; I believe the second picture is of the one on the right in the first picture)  would be the closest we'd get to this species in our day plus on the road here. We might honestly have missed them if it weren't for the couple of cars stopped in the opposite direction looking up on the hill right above our northbound lane. They were difficult to see because where they were standing was pretty much straight vertical from our position and out of our direct line of sight. But once we found them they were super close. And with a gorgeous backdrop of trees to add to the sighting.

Stopped cars are great on wildlife trips by the way. They are the universal symbol for I see something, no matter where you are looking for creatures.

I've sometimes had a tendency to dismiss elk as uninteresting. After all, they are just big deer with antlers that very much resemble those of the deer we have all around us in the woods at home. But elk aren't big, they are massive. And there's nothing like an up close encounter with these things to reinforce that fact. These are really big and powerful creatures.

If there's a feature of elk that adds to the impression of power, it's a fully developed antler rack because on a full-grown elk, these things are sharp and it shows. All the elk we saw at Rocky Mountain had velvet antlers, meaning they are still growing and developing. I guess the elk really need fully grown headgear when they get into rutting season in September and October and they may need to use these things as weapons.

The other spot in the Park where we managed to find some elk was just to the west of Sheep Lakes and down the road to Alluvial Fan. Each of our sightings here were solitary elk but they both showed off some impressive antlers. There was some kind of crazy tourist trying to get as close as he possibly could to the one shown immediately above for a good picture. And he was on foot. If that thing had charged...

Don't get close to wildlife, folks. There's "wild" in the name after all. Nothing bad ended up happening. The tourist spooked the elk eventually causing it to move off away from us.

By Rocky Mountain standards, the kind of elk sightings we had might have actually been relatively modest. There are frequently fairly large herds of these animals to be found. All the individuals we came across I assume were solitary bulls or bachelor herds. I imagine the larger groups are made up of does and fawns. Still, considering I was at one wild elk before entering the Park, I was more than content with the five or six different occasions where we got to observe these creatures, and super happy with the closest look we got.

Bighorn Sheep

There are a few species on this planet that seem to be really good at eluding me. Flamingos, penguins and bighorn sheep come to mind here. I've been looking without many good results for bighorn sheep for probably about 10 or so years and it seems like every other year or so I look and find nothing. We did get a glimpse of these animals in Utah in 2015 and saw a herd a couple of years later in New Mexico. After Rocky Mountain National Park, I'll continue to look for them when I travel but I don't think they are avoiding me anymore.

As I wrote earlier in this post, it seemed to us that the logical places to start looking for bighorn sheep were Bighorn Mountain and Sheep Lakes. I mean, why name these places like that if there were no bighorn sheep there? They are, by the way, right next to one another. Apparently the sheep come down off the mountain, cross the road and then head to the watering hole. We didn't know that before we visited the Park.

As soon as we pulled into the parking lot near Bighorn Mountain, we noticed a family of about five or six people hurrying away from their picnic table. Six bighorns had just run by and, cameras in hand, the humans were in hot pursuit across a sheep poop infested field. Seemed like a good sign but chasing across a field to follow sheep running in a forest is not a winnable war. We got there too late. No sheep.

Now if we had known the part about the sheep leaving the mountain and heading for the lakes, we'd have just hopped in the car and driven down to the parking area near Sheep Lakes. But we didn't, so we lingered at Bighorn Mountain, figuring if six sheep can come down the mountain, why can't some more. They didn't. Not while we were there.

Have I mentioned how lucky we were on this trip?

We finally did make it to Sheep Lakes and fortunately we were blessed with the sight of four rams drinking from one of the lakes. Finally, a clear, long look at this species!! There was no hurry and they didn't go anywhere for the hour that we spent there watching them. You read that right: an hour!

Now they were pretty far away but we did bring our super duper Nikon COOLPIX P900 camera with us which usually serves double duty as our binoculars and long distance camera which allowed us to get some terrific shots of the sheep. And yes, it must have been molting season or something. These are some shaggy sheep.

So we didn't see them scaling the mountainside on an impossibly steep slope or battling for dominance with their horns. This was a quality sighting all the same.

Then it got better.

There are two lakes at Sheep Lakes: one to the south of the parking lot and one to the west. While we were looking south, more sheep had arrived to the west. 

By more sheep, I mean about 20 to 25 ewes and lambs.

This was just an incredible sight. I'm assuming the four rams we were looking at were a bachelor group of sorts. The moms and kids were a huge bonus here and we could see them closer than the rams and in superb detail thanks to our camera. The sum total of all the activity here was getting a drink of water and having the moms make sure their lambs were staying put and staying safe. We've seen mother and baby scenes in the wild before but I'm not sure I've seen a group this big where every mother seems to have a child to look after.

It seems odd to get crazy enthusiastic about a few mothers and children going for a drink but this is what nature's about. Survival, raising young...this is life. This is it!

We appreciate just how lucky we got here. We've searched and earned this. By all accounts from the people around us and the ranger on hand, this was a great sight to see. We met a family from California later that night in the same spot (long after the sheep had gone) and talked to a guy who'd been hoping to see bighorn sheep for years including in Rocky Mountain and had pretty much failed spectacularly. We know we were super fortunate. We'll take it. We had some disappointments earlier in this trip. I'll take those too considering this payoff.

Since we had a ranger around and no inkling as to where to look for bears, we thought we'd ask. We didn't get a good answer, just that probably not near Sheep Lakes. She said she hadn't seen any bears in that location for two years.

Bears

After we had checked moose, elk and sheep off our wish list, we discussed the likelihood of us seeing bears on this trip. My response here was I thought we would; I was feeling it. Big time! Call it bravado but I felt good about it. And I was right. And it was at Sheep Lakes.

There's something a little thrilling about seeing animals in the wild. Any animals I mean. But ultimately when it comes down to it, the predators are more thrilling than the prey. First, they are generally more scarce; they just don't multiply and live the way grass eaters do. Second, and this may just be me, but I think predators are much more resourceful and strategic about the way they live. After all, you don't have to think about how to eat grass or leaves; you need to up your game if you are hunting, even if it's just the diet of a black bear.

So I'm all into this moose running across this field, right? I mean really feeling pretty great about seeing another moose. 

Then my wife yells: "BEAR!"

Of all our wildlife encounters in Rocky Mountain, our look at a momma bear and two cubs were the least clear, the most rushed and the least well photographed. But if we hadn't been chasing bighorn sheep for over a decade, it would have been the best.

We'd seen a scene similar to this one a few years ago at Denali with a grizzly bear and her two cubs. Just another day in the life of a bear, really: moving from one place to the next searching for something to eat along the way while mother keeps an eye on the kids who really just want to mess around at least half the time. 

It is difficult to get any sort of detailed look at anything watching wildlife from the distance we were at that night. But right after I took the first bear photo in this post, mom tossed aside a rock probably about a quarter her size probably looking for grubs or something. A rock a quarter the size of an adult bear isn't small and I have to tell you that thing got tossed aside like I was moving the couch cushions looking for loose change. It moved! And quick. It really gave me a sense of the strength of this animal that it could move something that heavy so easily.

Shortly after that, they were gone.

And I don't really toss aside the couch cushions to look for change. It was the best analogy I could think of. 

Bighorn Mountain. Where the sheep come from.

If we had scripted a day and a bit at Rocky Mountain National Park, I'm not sure I could have done it any better than it actually happened. Literally everything we wanted to see we saw. And the weather was gorgeous. What else could we want? We did not make it to Bear Lake (the parking lot was full and we didn't feel it was prudent to shuttle bus out there) but I can't see how being at Bear Lake would have enhanced our experience at all.

It is also awesome to end a trip on a high note like this, particularly when I wondered before we left home if the trip we planned to take (to California) would be better than the one we actually took. I'm not sure I have any complaints and I'm sure a big reason for this was our experience at Rocky Mountain. I know I went home with nothing left on the table which is an awesome feeling.

I'm also glad we missed this place last fall, despite my frustration with Frontier Airlines on the day we were supposed to be leaving. I know if we'd have visited in November, we likely wouldn't have had a day anywhere near this awesome and we never would have gone back. Now, it's part of my best travel memories.

If you go and if you have a spouse or a friend with good eyes, take that person. Of all the wildlife we saw in this park, I think I only spotted one of these animals first. My wife did all the hard work here. But that's no surprise to me.

When you get the chance to stand on a pile of snow in late June, I say go for it!

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How We Did It

Rocky Mountain National Park is open every day of the year. But there are a couple of buts.

Right now in the summer of 2020 if you plan to enter the Park by car between the hours of 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. you need a reservation which will allow you to enter the park in a two hour window. Details about how to reserve a spot can be found on the Park's website. We reserved passes as soon as they went on sale for our times on June 26 and 27 of this year. If you plan to enter the park before 6 in the morning or after 5 in the afternoon, no reservation is required.

We entered the Park just after 6 a.m. on June 26 at the Grand Lake Entrance Station and found nobody around to check our reservation so we just drove in. The next day we entered just a bit later at Fall River Entrance Station and found the gate fully staffed and reservations being checked.

Also, part of Trail Ridge Road is routinely closed from mid-October through Memorial Day so making the same drive we made inside of that window isn't possible. We also saw notifications that the road was partially closed just a couple of weeks before we visited based on snow. Yes, in mid-June. Keep an eye on the status of the Road if you plan to visit pretty much outside of July and August.

We stayed in Winter Park southwest of the Park and in Estes Park northeast of the Park. Both towns were great for us, with plenty of dining options in both locations.

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