Rocky Mountain National Park - Part 3

Friday, June 30, was our third day in Rocky Mountain National Park. It was the coldest morning of our trip, so we once again were grateful for our warm coats and jackets. We decided to go on a ranger guided hike first thing that morning at Lily Lake, since Austin had to do one of the ranger-led activities to earn his Jr. Ranger Badge. The hike took us up on Lily Ridge and then back down to the lake, which we continued around on our own. The information the ranger shared was quite interesting. She told Austin and another kid on the hike a story about how mice hide in pine cones from a Douglas Fir tree to escape a fire, but ended up getting burned while in the pine cones. Now you can see little mouse feet and tails sticking out of the pine cones of Douglas Firs.

Ranger explaining the story behind the pine cone of Douglas Fir trees

View of Lily Lake from the Ridge Trail

The riparian and montane habitats surrounding the lake were full of interesting plants and animals that we all enjoyed seeing.

Boulder Raspberry in bloom

Boulder Raspberry fruit forming

Yellow Stonecrop

Colorado Columbine

Red-Winged Blackbird

We even saw a couple muskrats swimming toward then diving under the boardwalk.

There were a lot of Tree Swallows and Violet-green Swallows flying about. I rarely see Violet-green Swallows, so it was fun to spot them. Swallows are really hard to capture a picture of since they move so fast, but Nate got a couple of the Tree Swallows that weren't too terribly blurry.

After finishing our circle around the lake, we debated some what else to try tackling that day. We ultimately decided to try hiking up Lily Mountain, which was very close to the lake. The trail was just over 2 miles long one way, and it was more of a climb than the other trails we had done since it had over a 1000 foot elevation change, but Austin did great on it. He particularly enjoyed climbing up rocks along the trail.

The final assent to the top was the most rocky part of the trail, but Austin loved it.

 

Mule deer right next to the trail

The view from the top of the mountain was beautiful. It was well worth the hike up!

Longs Peak from the top of Lily Mountain

 

The drop to the west of Lily
Mountain is pretty sheer

After getting back from our hike, we hurried to the Moraine Discovery Center where Austin got his Jr. Ranger Badge just before it closed. He enjoyed doing the activities in his booklet, and he was pretty happy with his badge.

We decided to visit the Alluvial Fan before calling it a day, so that is where we headed next. The hike to the falls here was very short. We found if we were careful we could step out onto rock and dirt islands in the middle of the rushing water here.

This brought our total hiking distance for the day to about 5.9 miles. In total, we hiked about 17 miles together during our three days in the park. Not too shabby for a trip with a six year old...However, I must admit we were pretty sick of playing "I spy with my little eye..." by the end of the week, as this turned out to be Austin's favorite thing to do as we hiked. We also played a lot of "Follow the Leader" and "20 Questions" to break up the endless "I spy" games, so we were getting a rather worn out on those as well.

We headed home on Saturday. However, we decided the main road was entirely too fast for us, so we decided to use a dirt frontage road to get home instead.

Just kidding. Actually, we made a bad choice in exits to take in order to change drivers quick in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming, and we picked one in which there was no way to get back onto the freeway in the right direction. Instead, we had to drive 5 miles on a very bumpy dirt road to the next freeway entrance. We were grateful we were not in a low riding car at the time. In any case Austin did seem to particularly enjoy this section of our trip home.