Tatanka

What is it about even numbered years and bison lately? In 2018, we spent some time in North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park, saw a few bison and I wrote my first bison post on this blog. Two years later, we visited Yellowstone National Park, saw a ton of bison pretty much everywhere (including outside Yellowstone) and I wrote my second bison post on this blog. Now it's 2022 and we've just returned from a visit to the southwestern corner of South Dakota where there are (you know what's coming...) a whole lot of bison.

I called that first bison post in 2018 "Bison Bison" after the animals' genus and species and to emphasize that they are NOT buffalo. I added another "Bison" with my second post. I can't in all good conscience just add another "Bison" to the name of this blog post so I'm changing things up and going with "Tatanka", which is the Lakota (or Sioux, if they are an enemy to you) word for these animals. Here goes blog post number three about bison. This has to be the last one, if for no other reason than I don't know where exactly I'd go that I haven't already seen these creatures.

Although I guess there might be some in Nebraska.

Bison on the move in Badlands National Park.

I have documented the almost extinction of the bison on my two past posts on this same topic but a refresher is probably in order: when European settlers first arrived in North America and had an opportunity to see just how many bison there were out there in what is now the United States of America, they used estimates of 30 to 60 million of these animals. In 1889, the number was down to 1,091. North of 30 million to about a thousand in about 100 years or so. It was a staggering slaughter driven by greed, cruelty and a desire to cut off one of the essential natural resources available to Native American tribes. Kill the bison, kill the people who relied on them, or so went the thinking.

If we had visited South Dakota 200 years ago, we likely would have found vast herds of bison, thousands upon thousands of these animals with enough mass to make the Earth tremble when they started running. We would have also found a thriving Lakota culture whose very spiritual and literal existence would have revolved around the animals. Food, clothing, housing and tools would have all been missing without the bison.

Fifty or so years later, there would be no bison in South Dakota. Extinct in the 1870s.

Wind Cave National Park, Black Hills.

So considering their total extinction in the state in the nineteenth century, we knew our bison-watching experience in South Dakota was likely to be way different than in a place like Yellowstone National Park, which is one of the very few places on Earth where there is a herd descended from animals that roamed in the same spot hundreds of years ago. Not that we really care about lineage of bison or anything like that. We don't need purebred bison to enjoy watching these magnificent creatures. But the ones we hoped to find in South Dakota would have been deliberately placed there. They also would be roaming a far smaller parcel of land than Yellowstone National Park, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

For that last reason, we thought we'd stand the best chance of finding a significant number of bison by searching in a few places. Like a couple of National Parks and a State Park.

And yes, you read that last part correct, there is a State Park (Custer State Park, site of a memorable 2020 de-pantsing incident for a tourist who ignored the "don't approach bison" warning) in South Dakota with a herd of bison. This is not the first time we'd been in a such a place. There's one in Utah also (Antelope Island State Park) but Custer has a significantly larger bison presence, or at least it did when we visited. And they are not in pens or cages or anything like that. They are roaming free (although the whole place is fenced with cattle guards where roads cross the fence line). I'm completely jealous. I can't remember the last time I went to a Virginia State Park, probably because there are none nearby (or anywhere for that matter) that have their own herd of bison. I'd be there all the time if I lived in southwest South Dakota. 

Custer State Park. The horns on the first bison are particularly impressive.

So what were we up against, here? Well, Wind Cave National Park has between 250 and 400 bison; Badlands National Park has about 1,200 or so; and Custer State Park boasts 1,000 to 1,600 at any one time. All of the Parks (not just Custer State Park) are fenced to keep the animals in a relatively small location. At Custer, the herd is managed to right-size it to its location. There are no predators large enough to take down a bison in the Park so to prevent over-grazing, some members of the herd are auctioned off every year. You might think fencing and herd-managing equates to a zoo. I can see you thinking that way; we didn't. These are still free-roaming wild animals who survive out on their own. It may not have quite been Yellowstone, but this counted for us.

And as we found out, just showing up and paying admission didn't guarantee a bison sighting. We worked for the photos that I'm posting on here. We also didn't want to find ones and twos of bison like we found four years ago in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We really wanted to find a sizeable herd with some baby bison, considering our visit coincided pretty well with the mid-point of calving season. Who doesn't love baby bison?

Close-up. Wind Cave National Park.

We started our bison hunt last month in Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park. The two Parks share a common boundary so driving from one to the next was extremely convenient. Both Parks are located in the Black Hills, a coniferous forest with intermittent meadows and open landscapes which in theory would make bison-spotting much more difficult than somewhere with a more open landscape. The Hills are also sacred to the Lakota and several other Native American tribes, but that's another story for another time.

Perhaps it's obvious from the pictures posted so far here but we did succeed in seeing bison at both Wind Cave and Custer. At Wind Cave, we covered the main Park drive down Highway 87 both north to south and south to north along with traveling on the gravel / dirt road called Highland Ridge Road or Route 5. That latter road is not super easy in a Toyota Camry and considering we got a good look at about three bison on the entire road (although that did include the close-up above), we probably could have skipped it and not missed out on anything. Although we had no way of knowing that ahead of time.

Highway 87 is a gorgeous winding road that takes you from prairie to forest and back to prairie with some incredible one way bridges. But the only place we saw bison on that road was at the north end on outside of the forest. And there were not that many bison along that road either. More than the gravel / dirt road but not a spectacular number. Wind Cave had the fewest bison of the three parks so perhaps that's not surprising.

Our time in Custer State Park was remarkably similar to Wind Cave. Custer has a larger herd and a brand new (...like literally brand new as of May 2022) Bison Center in the Park but we saw no more bison on our drive along the Wildlife Loop Road than we did in Wind Cave. One of the first things I do when I get back from any trip is to organize my photos and flag my favorites. Of all the bison pictures we took in South Dakota, only one Custer photo made the cut. That's not to say our experience was worse at Custer State Park than Wind Cave, but we certainly emerged with fewer keeper pictures there than we did earlier in the day. 

Last two pictures from Wind Cave. 

I'm also not saying our day searching for bison in the Black Hills wasn't worth it. It totally was. I'd definitely put it ahead of our experience in North Dakota four years ago, but we also definitely didn't get what we hoped to find. And yes, I've been on enough wildlife trips to know not to have high expectations. Our hopes for the herd and the baby bison were now pinned squarely on Badlands National Park.

2022 was not my first time at Badlands National Park. I stopped there for maybe 30 or 45 minutes on my way from Kansas City to Deadwood in 2011. We drove maybe a third of the Badlands Loop Road (the main road connecting the two primary entrances to the Park) on that visit and saw the amazing landscape characteristic of the Dakota badlands, but certainly nothing resembling any sort of sizeable wildlife. Or any wildlife at all, really. I would not have placed high hopes of Badlands salvaging my bison experience 11 years later based on that trip in 2011. This seemed risky.

It wasn't. Badlands National Park was the best thing we did in our four days in South Dakota. Hands down. We had some amazing experiences on other days. In fact, pretty much everything we did in the four days we were out doing things in South Dakota was really memorable, which is a little shocking to write. But Badlands was the best.

Two bison pictures from Badlands National Park.

We planned Badlands. We charted out a route that had us entering in the middle of the Park fairly early in the day; hoping for some bighorn sheep at Pinnacles Overlook; heading east down Badlands Loop Road; circling back through Wall (and Wall Drug!); re-entering in the middle of the Park; and finally heading west along the gravel Sage Creek Rim Road where, according to the Park's website, we were most likely to see bison.

In what turned out to be a really good omen, we found three bachelor bison before we even entered the Park. We got lucky with the bighorns shortly after that. 14 total, including one lamb, set against the gorgeous eroded landscape of the badlands that looks like some giant had taken a giant plow to the Earth and then just left the ground that way and walked away, leaving it cut and scarred as a series of valleys between sand and orange-ish colored mounds. The Badlands Loop Road winds on top of, between and around these mounds, and we hoped for a sighting of a bison or the whole herd every time we saw around the next one. We got none.

I don't know quite what it was about Badlands. Certainly the bison and the bighorn sheep sightings helped but I think more than anything else it was the landscape and the weather. The place is so different between the badlands (small b) areas and the prairies. There's such a contrast between those two but it IS just those two. It's not like Yellowstone with their five or six or seven or eight or more different environments. Just badlands and prairie. I think it helped that it was sunny and windy to keep us warm and cool. I've been in windier places for sure in my life but I don't think I've ever seen birds fly into the wind and go exactly nowhere or seen fields of grass rippled to make them like impressionist painting backgrounds the way we saw at Badlands. All of that contributed to my love of that Park the second time around. 

And yes, we DID see the herd of bison we hoped to find. We found them on Sage Creek Rim Road, just like the website suggested we would. We actually saw multiple groups of bison along that road, in bachelor groups of twos and threes and a larger herd of what also looked like an all-male herd of 20 or 25 or so. We saw more bachelor bison in Badlands than in Wind Cave and Custer combined.

The herd was the best. 50, 60, maybe 70 bison. Too many to count quickly, or even at all if we had tried because they tend not to stand still. I get that this herd we came across is tiny compared to the sizes of the groups that used to roam the prairies and the hills and the forests and badlands of what is now South Dakota. Those days are gone. For now, the herds in Badlands and places like that are the best we have. Maybe one day they'll get bigger but they'll never get back to the numbers they used to have. There's not enough contiguous open space. Humans won't allow it.

Bison as far as the eye can see. And a baby up close. Badlands National Park.

There were plenty of future bison adults in the herd too. Juvenile males who will one day compete with their brothers and cousins for the right to the herd for themselves along with newly born calfs who couldn't have been more than a few months old, pale brown and not yet the darker color of their mothers or the brood born the prior year. It's encouraging seeing species survive and it's great that all three parks we visited have this circle of life continuing, even if it will never be what it was.

I don't think I'll be writing about bison again on this blog. These creatures have been such a source of joy as they have taken us to new states as we've come closer and closer to all fifty. I'd love to re-visit Yellowstone again someday. That place was definitely the number one bison Park I've ever been to and there's so many other things to see there. But Wind Cave and Custer measured up admirably based on their herd sizes and Badlands will go down as a signature National Park experience. I'm glad I went back. It was sort of a throw-in, too obvious to pass up. It definitely turned out to be so much more than that.

Pretty satisfied with Badlands National Park.

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How We Did It

Wind Cave National Park and Badlands National Park are open year round to visitors. Each Park has a single Visitor Center. Visitor Center hours vary by season at Wind Cave. Badlands' Visitor Center is open year round, except for certain holidays, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Clicking the name of each Park in this paragraph will take you to the Parks' Operating Hours & Seasons webpage. The gift store at Badlands, by the way, is incredible. We could have spent a fortune in that place.

One of the big draws to Wind Cave is the variety of cave tours offered daily into the Park's namesake underground cavern. We elected not to explore the cave. We've been in caves before and our schedule was full enough roaming around on the surface of the Earth that day Maybe one day we'll go back underground, but it wasn't to be in South Dakota.

Custer State Park is also open year round to visitors. Services which operate in the summer may not operate all year. There is a $20 admission for a seven day pass and season passes are available. The Park's brand new Bison Center is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Memorial Day to Labor Day with reduced hours during other seasons. There's some good information in the Bison Center but a visit isn't going to take that long.

If you are traveling between Custer State Park and Rapid City, I'd highly recommend a drive along the Needles Highway, otherwise known as South Dakota Route 87. We drove back to Rapid City along this road and the views are truly stunning, particularly through the last tunnel hewn out of a giant boulder.

The cover picture of this post is a detail of a sculpture on the southwest corner of 6th and Main Streets in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota. There are other animals hidden in the sculpture of the native American on that street corner. The bison embedded in the figure's headdress seemed to be an appropriate cover photo to me.

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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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Out Of Darkness

There are 59 National Parks in the United States. And by that I mean true National Parks with full status, not National Monuments or properties under the care of the National Park Service. Of those 59, three are caves. I visited one of these, Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, on a bourbon and music tour of Tennessee and Kentucky back in 2006 which I sometimes refer to as my camera-less vacation because I think it's the only significant trip I've taken without a camera since I got out of school in 1994. I managed to visit another this month: Carlsbad Caverns National Park just outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Carlsbad Caverns had been on my non-existent bucket list for a while, probably ever since I took a trip to northern New Mexico in 2001 and became determined to do the southern half of the state in a subsequent trip. Sometimes these things take a while to come together; 16 years in this case as it turns out. Better late than never.

That '06 trip to Mammoth Cave got me a little bit inside the largest cave system discovered so far in the world, with a total of 400 miles of passageways documented to date. Carlsbad Caverns would be a little different. It is nowhere near as big but features one of the largest underground rooms ever discovered, appropriately nicknamed The Big Room which is almost 4,000 feet long; that's over 3/4 of a mile long if you thought about doing the math. 

The other famous draw of Carlsbad Caverns is the daily dusk departure of hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats on their nightly hunt. But they are migratory and only live in New Mexico in the summer months. I visited in winter. The Big Room would likely have to suffice for this trip. I was excited to explore nonetheless.

Foreshadowing...

Carlsbad Caverns were granted National Monument status in 1923 after being surveyed by Robert Holley of the General Land Office. Accompanying Holley on that survey were photographer Ray V. Davis, whose photographs of the Caverns published earlier that year in the New York Times had brought national attention to the site, and Jim White, who was according to legend or myth or actually written history the first (white) person to enter the Caverns.

One year later an expedition featuring White was sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the following year the first stair was installed at what is called the Natural Entrance today. From there, things moved quickly: the National Park Service installed a trail all the way to The Big Room in 1926 and the first visitors arrived the following year. Admission was $2 per person, which was actually pretty expensive back then. And I can't imagine how long it took folks to get there 90 years ago on 1920s roads using 1920s transportation.

The Caverns became a full National Park in 1930 and achieved UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1995.

There are basically two options for the visitor to explore Carlsbad Caverns: take a ranger-guided tour or take a self-guided tour. The two self-guided tours take you into the Caverns for a length of 1-1/4 miles and around The Big Room for about the same length. The ranger-guided tours take you further and some require that you get on your hands and knees and do a little bit of (almost) spelunking. Since we were traveling that day from Roswell (about 1-3/4 hours) and to Las Cruces (about 2-1/2 to 3 hours) we decided the self-guided tours would do us just fine. 

The first question we were faced with when buying tickets was do you want to take the elevator down? Sure, why not. Seems like a great way to get to The Big Room quickly. We took in the 15-20 minute introductory movie and then made our way into the elevator, which counts not in floors but in feet down. The Big Room, where the elevator dumps you out, is about 750 feet below the surface of the Earth.

After a couple of minutes of general "wow, it's dark down here" adjustment, we were off exploring. We were about to embark on an hour and 45 minute tour around The Big Room. And for sure it was big! Any time I spend almost two hours walking around a single room I know I'm someplace pretty large. And the formations are incredible: stalactites and stalagmites and soda straws and draperies and popcorn with names like the Chinese theater, the boneyard, the hall of giants, the lion's tail and rock of ages.

But I have to say after a while, it all starts to look the same. I know what you are thinking: there are many people who would go great lengths to stand where I stood earlier this month and my response is "yawn"? Not quite that bad but pretty much, yes. Don't get me wrong, it is worth the trip to stand in The Big Room but after the initial awe of how long and high the cavern is and after you've checked out formation after formation, the stuffy air, the poorly lit pathways (not really complaining about the lighting; I did not want it floodlit) and the more of the same started to wear on me. I feel like a horrible human being.

This is my favorite photo of The Big Room. The lighting on the main column is really clear.

I mentioned previously that there are two self-guided tours at Carlsbad Caverns. I have to admit I was so focused on getting to the main attraction in the Caverns that I completely forgot what the other trail was. But since we had come all that way, I was determined to do both. And here's where my Carlsbad Caverns experience turned around and made this into a special place for me.

The other self-guided tour is called the Natural Entrance Route and it is quite literally the way into the cave. Most people start out with this one and then end up at The Big Room, I suppose. Since we'd opted to say yes to the elevator question earlier, we completely skipped the Natural Entrance and just fast forwarded to the good stuff, or so we thought.

So there we were at the bottom of the cave looking at our map that we'd picked up at the Visitor Center and it hit us: we bypassed the way most people get into the cavern; why not take that way out. Yes, you read that right. We took the elevator down and decided to climb out. All 750 feet up, which on the surface of things doesn't sound that bad. It turned into an amazing hike for us.

750 feet is a long way up, especially when parts of the trail actually go back down to get around fallen rocks which require you to go more up. Pretty soon, we noticed we were pretty much alone in our ascent. Everyone we passed was going down; the easy way so to speak. We got some comments: Crazy! You're climbing UP? One woman offered us advice to stop every so often and breathe. The best was just a single word: "Suicide!" Well, hopefully it's not going to come to that.

We asked the woman with the breathing advice if we were close. Her answer was a one word "No!"

Natural Entrance a.k.a. the way out. What we spent an hour walking towards.

If you hustle (I like to think we hustled), it will take you about an hour to walk the bit more than a mile from The Big Room to the Natural Entrance. You also might get a bit sweaty. It's hard work. Waiting for us at the exit were some signs shown in one of the photographs above. I love the "Strenuous Hike Ahead. Exhaustion and Weak Knees Common." sign warning you about the descent. Start at the bottom and walk up and you'll see no such signs. Don't say you haven't been warned by me.

I have to say there's not a whole lot of super interesting stuff to see on the way out. There are no grand open spaces with huge rock formations or underwater lakes. Other than the one enormous rock that had fallen from the ceiling of the Cavern to open up a passage below, there was little to gaze at in awe. The payoff for sure is at the bottom.

But what the walk up did for me was make me appreciate how far underground we were and how difficult it must have been for the first cavers (both Jim White and everyone unrecorded that came before him) to get down to somewhere magnificent. I thought about how primitive their first exploration tools would have been: maybe a rope ladder or a bucket or platform on a winch and for sure just some candles for light. These people were not walking down and up a paved trail with a couple of warning signs on them. If they got lost or their tools failed, they were dead for sure. I can't imagine the sense of adventure that would have driven them to go deeper and deeper and the amazement they would have felt when they discovered each new underground room.

Once we passed the breathing advice woman and the suicide dude, we started looking for any signs of the end. Was that a sliver of daylight or just another electric light positioned to illuminate some ages old rock formation? We kept stopping and looking up to see if we could see the light. We didn't dare ask anyone how much further we had to go. We didn't want to get discouraged. 

Finally the end we sought was not visual but audible. We stopped and heard some chirping, which was a surprise to us because we assumed they were the bats which weren't supposed to be there. Just a little while later we discovered diffuse light filtering through a cloud of condensation with a  whole colony of cave swallows darting in and out of the cave entrance. We'd made it! We could have taken the elevator back up and left the Caverns with a little bit of a disappointing experience. By hoofing it out, I really feel like we accomplished something and understand this place on a deeper level. It made my trip there.

Made it!!! Finally out of the darkness and into the light of day.

Carlsbad Caverns wasn't done giving us good surprises yet, though.

The drive from Roswell to the Park is pretty monotonous: about 90 minutes of driving on desert highways before downgrading to some smaller similarly uninhabited roads. But just before you arrive there, the landscape changes dramatically.

The Caverns are on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert and Guadalupe Mountains so when you get about a quarter of an hour away, the landscape changes from flat scrubby desert to rocky rolling hills. Eventually you realize you are driving on top of the Caverns and their huge open rooms below.

On our way out we stopped to take a picture or two of the landscape we traveled over to get there before we headed out on the long drive to Las Cruces. Our delay got us on the road right about when a deer was crossing after we came around a bend and we slowed down to let it pass. Only it wasn't a deer. It was a bighorn sheep, the animal I've been seeking all over the western United States for about seven years. I saw one a couple of years ago in Zion National Park on the top of a cliff at sunset. But this one was right in front of us. Stop the car! We're taking some pictures.

Turns out it wasn't A bighorn sheep. It was the last bighorn sheep in a herd of 12 or so that crossed the same road. The rest of them were already halfway up the hill by the time we rounded our bend. They are difficult to see in the picture below but they are there. There's a line of rocks right in the center of the picture. They are clustered right in the middle of that band.

What a day! A great climb out of a deep cave and a family of bighorns. Can't get much better than that.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the third cave National Park is Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. Guess that's on my list now. Gotta be a completist.