Aug 16 – Drive from Estes Park to Walden, CO. via Colorado State Forrest

Frustrated by our lack of Moose viewing, we hit up google, and found out that Walden, CO was supposed to be the “Moose Viewing Capitol of Colorado”, so we google mapp’ed  from Estes Park, CO to Walden, CO.  A bit discouraged by the fact that Walden is over a 3 hour drive from Estes Park, but even more upset that we hadn’t seen moose, we weighed our options and got on the road before sunup.  Just as I was wondering if I was too tired to be driving, I looked up on a rock face and saw several big horn sheep!  The sheep we had searched all over for in the park were right along side the road!

We drove through perhaps the most beautiful scenery of the trip on the way to the Colorado State Forrest.  We took side roads, and all sorts of places that we were told Moose hide, all with zero luck.  We finally decided to give up searching on our own and drive towards the moose visitor center, where we saw two moose, one decent sized male, on the side of the road!  They were very skittish, and kept their distance, but just seeing them was exciting.

We then went to the visitor center, where they told us to take a trail by  the lake, however there were tons of children and pets, which we guessed was the reason why there were  no moose in the area at that time.  We were both starving, so we went towards Walden to get food.  Now, I’m not sure if road signs measure distance as a crow flies, or the path a vehicle takes, but our gas light had just come on, and let me tell you, that was the longest 22 miles in my entire driving life!  I just KNEW we were walking, as the gas light was on forever, while we had no cell signal.  Since the iPhone’s GPS works off of the data network to receive the maps, we couldn’t even tell how close we were getting!

On the way back, we saw one more moose (the one you see in the gallery), but she was in a severely overgrown area, so we couldn’t get much closer.  We did get to chatting with a fellow photographer, who was local to the area, and showed us a shortcut back to Estes Park, that cut almost 45 minutes off of our drive home.

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