Revisiting National Parks

Rocky Mountain National Park and Yellowstone are both national parks I had been to before.  I’d spent a month in the Yellowstone area (and a day or two inside the park itself) when I took the Yellowstone Field Course offered by the University of Pittsburgh Honors College back in 1995.  I traveled up into Rocky Mountain National Park a couple of times when the AP U.S. Government grading took place in nearby Fort Collins CO.  In each case, revisiting highlighted some aspects of the park I hadn’t seen previously. 

In Yellowstone we revisited the forgettable Mammoth Hot Springs, but then took the road down the western side of the park past many other hot springs and geyser basins.  I hadn’t seen Old Faithful erupt, and the eruption was worth the wait.  This time the visit was much more Geyser focused, and geysers are neat.  I only wish I had had the good fortune to visit the hot spring someone at Dinosaur told us about – a spring in the camp ground where one could bathe in the heated waters.  Of course, their visit was some decades ago, and it is likely that the Park Service’s ongoing efforts to fence nature off have led to a situation in which this is no longer available.


Rocky Mountain National Park was also approached from the opposite direction – up US 40 from I-70.  We saw a glorious herd of elk as the sun set.  And Sarah thought she lost one of the antique leather gloves she had just purchased as a shop in Georgetown CO.

We were very fortunate to stay that night -- a Friday night -- in the last hotel room available in Estes Park.  It was a fabulous room too -- or rather a suite with two bedrooms, a hot tub, a living room, a fire place.  The next morning after a second round of mini-golf and a swim in the pool, we returned to the parts of the park we had already visited the evening before.  Why?  To search for the glove.  The highlight on this revisit was after we had failed to find the glove, and David, Sarah, Anna, Miriam and I went on a walk off-trail across the alpine tundra, crossing snow drifts and admiring many tiny flowers.  Sarah noticed that two yellow ones that looked the same were actually distinct species with different types of colors on the stem.

And after we left the park, I opened the side door of the van, lifted a couple of pieces of flotsam... and revealed Sarah's glove.