Fall in Rocky Mountain National Park

These pics are from a while ago, but I'm posting them now because I just got access to my computer again (I got an LCD monitor for 75 bucks on craigslist and it's awesome!) Fall in Rocky Mountain National Park has to be the most beautiful season. The colors are spectacular; the aspen and willows are golden and the tundra is russet red. The elk are in the meadows getting down to business, and the eerie dinosaur-like calls of the bulls echo off the mountains. This fellow here strutted right in front of us as he went to check on his harem. He was a gorgeous specimen of elkdom.

The colors of fall are beautiful on a grand scale. . .. . . and on a small scale.

And the colors as we ascended to the tundra on Fall River Road took my breath away.

Sigh. I wish fall lasted more than a couple of weeks. I guess it does last longer here; it starts in the high country and works its way down. The trees on the plains are only now changing colors, while those in the mountains have lost all their leaves. But fall is definitely most spectacular when coupled with unspoiled mountain vistas.

Watch out, Steven Colbert

Matthew and I watched this bear walk around and munch on berries for about 20 minutes yesterday as we hiked near Boulder. Maxwell thought it looked like him and wanted to chase it.

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Fun with remote cameras

For work we put out four remote cameras to attempt to monitor marten populations, since martens are considered a sensitive species for our forest. We used a lure developed for trappers that smells like toothpaste (apparently martens like toothpaste??) The lure doesn't seem to have been working, but we have gotten some nifty shots of deer:
And this elk with messed-up antlers (which we researched and found out it's most likely due to a brain worm infestation):

But coolest of all, it seems that someone was interested in our bait after all:



Our next move, and I'm not joking, as disgusting as it sounds, is to pick up road-killed squirrels before we go out in the field next and use those as bait. Yeah, I know it sounds really gross, but squirrels are the primary food source for martens, and if the big fat ones down in Boulder don't lure them in, I don't know what will. Plus, it's recycling!

Fall colors

These past few weeks have been absolutely gorgeous up in the mountains. I haven't been doing as much field work lately as I had been earlier in the summer, but when I've gone out, I haven't been able to stop taking pictures of the gloriousness of fall aspen. Check it out:

I also have pics from the trip that Matthew and I took up to Rocky Mountain National Park a couple weekends ago, but they are on my computer at home and I don't currently have a monitor for it (the one that I had exploded a few days ago). So I will post those when I get access to the files on my computer once again.

In the news, Matthew and I both got jobs in the same week! He's going to be working as a real estate broker's assistant down in Denver and I'm going to be working for the City of Loveland as a GIS technician. Woo hoo! Now we don't have to starve to death when my Forest Service job ends!