Elk Viewing at RMNP

What I know about elk behavior wouldn't make much of a blog entry. I know that they enjoy being approached by tourists less than most of the other locals. I know that the males compete violently for the females when it's time to mate. I know that they tend to travel in herds and property lines and roads don't really mean anything to them.

There's a really big elk herd in Rocky Mountain National Park that sometimes encroaches on the streets and lawns in Estes Park. We've seen then crossing the streets and took quite a few pictures one day when they closed down the local golf course to graze on the green grass. I have a copy of an Estes Park newspaper that has a big color photo of a tourist being chased by a BIG bull elk on the front page.

But I've never seen anything like the scene that we watched last weekend in RMNP. There were hundreds of female elk grazing in a meadow, not a single bull to be seen. At least one of them was trumpeting, an erie sound to hear as the snow was falling and the sun was going down. I'm told that only the bulls trumpet, but I couldn't see one around. Then we watched as hundreds more came roaming up from further down the valley. There was a line of them that stretched for at least a half mile...and more coming after that. We watched for 15 or 20 minutes...it was awesome.

Then we drove on in a loop back to Estes Park. About 6 miles down the road, we rounded the corner and saw a huge bull elk standing no more than 12 feet from the roadway. He was grazing in a hollow and was close enough that we could take flash pictures of him. As we continued on, we saw 20 or 30 bulls all together in the meadows around Sheep Lake. It was too dark to get pictures of them, but it was another really cool thing to see. Every one of them had a rack of antlers as big as our Honda.

To say that elk are "majestic" doesn't really seem to do justice to these magnificent animals.

If you go to Estes Park or RMNP, make the driving loop at dusk and witness this for yourself. But don't approach the elk...they REALLY don't like it.

Have fun!