This was our second hike/exploring day in Rocky Mountain National park. We decided to start the day with a big breakfast, so Anne and I went into town to get donuts, but we were delayed on the way by some elk in the road. So here are some obligatory elk photos, taken abut 50 yards from our cabin:
Elk in the road
Elk among the cabins
Elk cows, one with tags
Bull Elk with cows
Our main event of the day was to go up to the Alpine Discovery Center, which was a long, uphill drive, through several layers of ecosystems. Some photos from a lookout along the drive:
Mountain ecosystems
Anne and Emmi
Elevation-based ecosystems
Finally we were in the alpine tundra, and then at the discovery center where we walked to the very top of the hill. Some hot chocolate at the center, then we hit the road again, stopping at another overlook for more tundra. Tundra photos:
Emmi, Kyle and Anne at the Alpine Center
Snow and tundra above the tree line
Emmi and Anne above the Alpine Center
The top of the hill
Looking down at the Alpine Centeer
Fragile Tundra Environment
Rocks driven to the surface by Ice-Age “frost heaves”
Rocks on the surface of the tundra
Rocks driven to the surface by Ice Age “frost heaves”
Anne at the lookout
Emmi and Kyle above the treeline
We stopped at another overlook, further down the hill:
Pines and aspens on the mountain
Kyle, Emmi Anne and me.
Our final destination was a place called Moraine Park, which was a wide valley where the elk could be found. There was also a creek — the Big Thompson River? — and some vegetation restoration areas, which were fenced off from the elk but accessible by gate. These were the last photos of the day:
Well, we’re staying another day, the snow and especially the ice being too much for us this morning — we packed and left, drove to the local bakery, and scared ourselves so much we went back to the hotel for another night. What that means is that I now have a bit of downtime, and can post some more of my photos, starting with our first day in Estes Park:
Our Cabin
The view from our cabin
The view from our cabin
Elk in the ballfield
On our first day in the park, we hiked from Bear Lake to Emerald Lake. No photo does justice to the spectacular beauty that surrounded us, but here are a bunch that seem to capture the light, and the beauty and the drama:
Mountain View
The mountains from the trail
Trailside trees and roots
Trailside view of the mountains
Trailside view of the mountains
Nymph Lake
Nymph Lake driftwood
Nymph Lake
Mountains
Dream Lake
Dream Lake and mountains
Trout in Dream Lake
Anne and Emmi on the trail
Emerald Lake
Anne and me at Emerald Lake
Pine Trees
Rocky Forest
Trailside forest scene
Anne and Kyle on trail
Bear Lake
Finally, some roadside pictures of rutting elk we passed on our way out. If you look you can see the bull (the one with the antlers) just left of center.
Here are my photos of the Denver Botanical Gardens, which we visited last Wednesday, starting with some wildflower and similar gardens near the entrance:
Then came some a water garden, a kitchen garden and a small desert landscape:
We ended with the Asian-themed, English garden, and futuristic landscapes, ones more generally connected with art or architecture:
We never did get to look at the indoor gardens and greenhouses — the day was so nice that we explored the outdoor gardens until the place closed.
Bethlehem had its St Patrick’s Day Parade on Saturday the 16th, which was breezy and chilly but otherwise a fine day. We went up the street and watched it go by, here are some pics:
It was a perfect springlike day Monday, so I hopped on the Iguana to do a little OpenStreetMapping — there was a note on the website saying that a Moravian spiritual retreat just outside of town had been closed, and I thought if I could go there and confirm it on the ground, I’d go ahead and make the change when I got home. The former retreat was right next to a new park too, so I could also do a little exploring when I got there.
My ride was pretty low-key: I was just out in street clothes and boots (and my helmet), something I’d been doing lately for casual riding; I was also inspired to keep it simple by Bike Snob’s recent article… I tooled up Main Street to Macada, then Altonah, then made a right onto Santee Mill Road, which is basically as bucolic as the City of Bethlehem gets. I was looking for a road/path off Santee Mill to take me into the park, but never found it (I saw later it was smaller than a sidewalk and very easy to miss). No matter, I continued forward, back into civilization, and entered the park from the front. Just outside the park entrance was a house where the retreat would have been; the house had posts out front, from which there might once have hung shingles, and the shingles might once have said “Spiritual Retreat” or whatever, but the shingles were gone now and there was a big “Private” sign by the driveway. So Phase 1 of my exploration was complete…
That left the park — officially, “The Janet Johnston Housenick & William D. Housenick Memorial Park” but apparently just called “Housenick Park” by normal people. This is a parcel of land donated by Janet Johnston Housenick, granddaughter of Archibald Johnston, the first mayor of the consolidated City of Bethlehem (he was also chief architect of that consolidation, and a high ranking executive at Bethlehem Steel — he was as Bethlehem as it gets). The land was once part of the Johnston farm/estate, and it includes the old Archibald Johnston Mansion. The park is fairly new and still under construction/renovation, but there are a bunch of new footpaths and old carriage roads, and I cruised around for about an hour, taking pictures.
Archibald Johnston Mansion
Driveway to the Big House
Monocacy Creek
Monocacy Creek
House on Hill
Lime Kiln
Inside the Lime Kiln
Behind The Big House
Monocacy Creek
Archibald Johnston Mansion
The Archibald Johnston Mansion
It’s hard to believe looking at it, but the estate only dates from the 1910’s or 1920’s — it looks typical of a farmstead from about 100 years earlier — and the house was built using Bethlehem Steel beams. There was a boat house and tennis courts (or the ruins of them), but there were also lime kilns and the remains of orchards, ornaments in a hobbyist’s historical reenactment of country-squire life.
The ride home was uneventful, and pleasant though the day was getting breezy. I returned via Township Line Road, which eventually becomes Altonah, and basically retraced my steps from there. I went about 16 miles all told, and total ride time was just over 2 hours
We got out for some walks a few weeks ago, and one of the walks took us through Nisky Hill Cemetery. This is one of the places where our friend Deb does her “walkabouts,” hiking around town and taking photos — she’s a prodigious walker with an enormous stride, and she has an incredible, artist’s eye for great shots. I might not have her skill or her eye (I don’t even walk that fast), but if you put me in the right place with a camera, even I might come home with a couple of keepers. Here are my favorites from that walk:
Cemetery and Blast Furnaces
Looking at The Steel from Nisky Hill
The Past Laid To Rest
The Blast Furnaces Are Quiet Now
The old Bethlehem Steel mills and blast furnaces look like they’re practically on top of the cemetery, but they’re on the other side of the Lehigh River. (By the way, this “looking down the hill at a giant industrial site, in a valley by a river” is a very Pennsylvania thing for me.)
We took another walk a few days later, up the hill and through the University, up stairways past ancient stone buildings and frat houses, and at the top we explored Mr. Imagination’s sculpture garden, now starting to fall apart in the woods.
Anne at the Millennial Folk Arch
The Millennial Folk Arch, view from the other side.
I took a bunch of pictures in Watkins Glen and the Corning Museum of Glass, thought I’d show some of them here.
In Watkins Glen, we camped at the state park, and there was a trail basically from our campground to the trails along the Glen, and then into town. It was cool and convenient, but the park was very crowded, overcrowded actually, and so it wasn’t as much fun as if we had the place (relatively) to ourselves.
The Museum of Glass was also very cool, but it really wasn’t a museum about glass per se, with history of glassmaking, chemistry and physics of glass, etc, which I would have liked — they had that, but it was more geared for kids, and in the “kid section” — but more an art museum, and museum art history, where the common medium is glass. Early artifacts, modern creations… the craziest part was the gift shop, where I saw several items in the $10,000-$50,000 price range and fragile as, well, glass, just sitting out on pedestals where kids were running around and anyone could bump into them…
We both had a free afternoon the weekend before last, the rain had stopped and the sun came out, and we were thinking of maybe doing a bike ride but the day seemed windy. So, we decided instead to go for a long, mushroom-hunting hike at an undisclosed location. Anne was hoping to find some morels, but since I can’t eat mushrooms I was just going along to look at the scenery and greenery…
The animated chewing gum of plants.
It wasn’t very green, and this first piece of mushroom-related flora is not particularly edible (as far as I know) but its bright yellow color was very pleasing. I’m pretty sure it was a slime mold of some kind, which means it’s a symbiotic mix of fungus and algae, and it’s one of the few plants that can actually move. It seemed pretty immobile to us — maybe it was resting, or trying to hide, or maybe it really was chewing gum.
I think of slime mold as a “processing” plant, turning other dead plants back into soil, and we saw a bunch of them in various places, working away. I took it as a good indicator that there were so many signs of vegetation decay, even to where you could smell it — every so often you’d get a whiff of composting or whatever, along with a slightly warmer puff of breeze. The detritus on the forest floor was definitely being processed. The rainy weather was probably a good thing for all those micro critters, and so maybe it would also be a good thing for regular mushrooms.
They were everywhere, and each was unique.
The rain had also driven the green-up, which in this unusually cold spring seemed slower in coming, into overdrive, and there were many plants and flowers in bloom that were not around just a week earlier, especially along the forest floor. (Granted, we were looking down a lot more than I usually do, so I could have been noticing more at ankle level than I usually would. Also, I was with Anne, who has a greater affinity and appreciation — and eye — for these plants than I do, and knows all their names.)
Anne really likes Jack-in-the-pulpits, and she spotted this one early on, as well as many more hidden under the taller plants. Some were a little farther along in blossoming than others, some had slightly different colors or patterns; it was strange to see how much they varied one from another, even as they seemed identical from even a short distance. I took photos of the first several –“ooh! there’s another one, and so different from that last one!”– before I got Jack-in-the-pulpit burnout, so I’ll stick with just this one photo, which I think was a pretty good representation of our discoveries.
This was the only one we saw all day.
Pay dirt! We really weren’t too far along into our hike when we saw this beauty. No one really knows what morels like or don’t like, but they do seem to appear on hilly slopes, on sunny spring days just after rain, so we had our hopes up, and here was confirmation.
Unfortunately, this was the only one we saw in 12 miles of searching.
Across the river and beyond
Not long after our single morel discovery, we came to the first cut through the woods, which I think is an old telephone line. I took the picture deliberately in this direction not just because this view was so pretty, but because, behind me as I took this, was where the power company had been refurbishing their own lines — bulldozers, gravel, a huge, mile-long scar maybe a hundred yards across…
Anyway, in his view you can see the Lehigh River through the trees; in the background is the Lehigh Valley, with Blue Mountain at the horizon. A few more steps and we were back in the woods, and back to looking down at the ground…
Up close and personal.
If you can see the ground! The may-apples are usually among the first things up, and they can get pretty dense. They form a knee-high simulacrum of the tree canopy above us, a mini-canopy which hides the world just below. Up until a few years ago I didn’t know that may-apples even had blossoms, since they form about midway up the stalk, hidden under the mini-canopy, which is a shame because they actually are very pretty flowers. Here I stuck my camera through the leaves and close to the ground, and got a nice close-up two of them.
A single may-apple blossom.
There were other places where the may-apples didn’t grow as thick, and you could see individual plants without too much trouble. Here’s one with its upper leaf and its blossom.
Underneath the may-apple, you can see a bunch of even smaller plants, forming yet another canopy on an even smaller scale. In many places these plants — violets, garlic mustard — were very thick on the ground, the main plants in that area, and formed an almost velvety-looking ground cover.
May Flowers
Here are a few of the smaller plants, a regular violet and maybe some white violets, spread out and a little more isolated from any others. There were all sorts of little flowering plants everywhere you looked, these were just a small sample.
Tulip poplar? Oak? Definitely tall and straight.
With all that looking down, I think ‘ll add one shot looking up at the real canopy. I’m not sure what this tree is, but there were many like it here and there, and they were impressively tall, with long straight trunks before you got to the first limbs. Maybe this is what it looks like to a bug under the violets, or a chipmunk under the may-apples.
We were on our way back at this point, and getting a little tired and sore — when we got home we realized we’d walked about 12 or 13 miles. A nice little walk in the woods!
