| On Sunday, January 4th, Heather and I went to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. We like to see
the park in winter, and I enjoy taking lots of pictures. Even though the mountains don't move, it always looks
different every time we go. It was cold, probably in the teens, and there wasn't much sunlight. Most of my pictures
will have a blue cast to them because of the low light. |
| Caution! You're going to be looking at the south end of a north bound bighorn sheep or elk. |
| Caution! If you're using a telephone modem, these pictures will take a long time to download. Sorry.
That was the only way to make them work without destroying the quality. |
| Actually these first pictures are just a few miles up the canyon from Loveland. It was just beautiful,
with a little bit of snow coming down, and the shadows on the mountains. In the lower picture on your left, that
white blotch just left of the "right lane" sign is a snowflake just a few inches from the lens. |
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| As you go about 10 miles up the canyon, there is a small town called Drake where the road splits to
Glen Haven. Just past the intersection, these bighorn sheep were grazing on the side of the mountain. There just
happened to be a large area to pull off the side of the road and there were about 10 cars pulled off, looking
at the sheep. I used my 75-300mm lens to shoot these pictures. |
| The next stop was in the sheep valley in RMNP. It was sunny but very cold. There were very few cars
there other than Heather and me. There was another photographer there, who had the same camera that I have (a Canon
digital Rebel) that was converted to infrared photography. It makes the contrast very extreme. If you're interested
in seeing some of that photography, follow this link: Gwigler.com. |
| The 2 pictures on your left are the same pictures. I shot these in the RAW setting,
which gives me an incredible amount of resolution, 240 dpi. I cropped the picture around the elk to be the same size
as the reduced pictures (like the pictures above), which is how I can get the close-up of the elk. The same is
true of the pictures on your right. Digital SLR cameras can do considerably more than film cameras once you learn
how to use them. The only problem is that I keep shooting the wrong end of the elk. |
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You can see the fence in the background of these pictures. This is the first time I've ever seen the elk fenced in.
The town of Estes Park is being overrun by elk so maybe this is a way to keep the elk from getting into Estes.
Imagine--looking out the front window of your house in Estes Park and seeing an elk grazing on your front yard! |
| The next stop on the trip was Bear Lake. There aren't any bears there
anymore. The peak in the background is Hallett Peak. In the summer you can hike the trail all the
way up to a lake at
the base of the peak. It's very beautiful, but it's a rigorous climb!
That's Heather on the left, standing out
in the middle of the lake. Where the man in the red jacket is standing, there's probably several feet of water under
the frozen ice. We walked about 1/3 of the way around the lake where there is a huge rock that people always stand on
to take pictures, and this picture is Heather standing on that rock. There are probably thousands of pictures across
the USA from when somebody came here for a vacation and took a picture standing on that rock!
The last 2 pictures on the right are the same mountain, but I changed the camera angle. That slight change caught
the light differently and made the picture look white. But it's 2 pictures of the same mountain, only a minute
apart. |
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| That's the end of our trip and my photography. If you're interested in seeing RMNP in the winter,
give me a call. It's always very different in the winter! |
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Another mile up the road and there were 2 more moose grazing about 500 ft off the road. In the background of these pictures you can see some
of the lodgepole pines that have died and turned red. There is a problem now with a pine beetle that gets in the trees and kills them.
Over on the east side, just after leaving the park but before Estes Park, there were a couple of elk grazing right on the side
of the highway.
A few miles east of Estes Park, there were some big-horned sheep right out on the highway. A car went by and scared them
and they ran several hundred feet down the road until they could get back up into the mountains.
