Estes Park, Colorado's Big Elk Population Chasing Tourists

The elk bearing down on the man in the picture is doing so in Estes Park, Colorado.

Estes Park is a popular summer resort town and is where Rocky Mountain National Park's headquarters is located.

At last count Estes Park had a population of 5,858. And for much of the year nearly 2,000 elk join the human inhabitants of Estes Park.

Estes Park average elevation is 7,522 feet, located on the eastern front range of the Rocky Mountains at the eastern entry to Rocky Mountain National Park.

Built in 1909 the Stanley Hotel in on the outskirts of Estes Park. Stephen King was a guest of the Stanley Hotel, a visit which inspired him to change the locale of his novel, The Shining, calling the Stanley Hotel the Overlook Hotel.

The highest highway in the United States, Trail Ridge Road, runs from Estes Park west through Rocky Mountain National Park and then on to Grand Lake at the Continental Divide.

Below is a map showing the location of Estes Park. As you can see it is a fairly short distance northwest of Denver.

Below is a BBC YouTube video about the elk in Estes Park. I have seen herds of elk take over the town-like north entry into Yellowstone National Park. It is sort of an unsettling spectacle.



Below are a couple interesting comments about the Estes Park elk video....

I'm a Colorado native and the elk population is in a serious boom cycle because the land is not hunted AND the elk no longer have their natural predators (wolves) around to cull the herd. When I was younger, the elk stayed in the park and were not in town as they are now. Spoke with a park ranger and they've talked of just killing some and letting nature take care of the carcasses. At least with hunters, they could make money from the license revenue, plus the meat would not go to waste.

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This is the same situation in Japan where the Shika deer no longer have their natural predators. It's a hunters' paradise since the government allows for a 5 month hunting season with no limit (limit of 1 deer a day per hunter applies). However Japan has far less hunter so the Shika deers are overpopulated and destroys crops and trees.

A Bear On My Car In Yellowstone National Park

That is a Yellowstone National Park bear talking to me through the window of my antique 1965 Mustang Fastback.

As you can see, this bear has stopped traffic.

When I was a kid, me and my siblings had to prove we could behave on lesser summer vacations, working our way up to going to Yellowstone when I was, I think, maybe 12 years old.

Yellowstone went well, so the next year we got to go to Disneyland and California for the first time.

On our first trip to Yellowstone we kept a tally of the animals we saw. If I remember right the bear total was over 30.

At some point in time Yellowstone changed how it managed the bears, so, nowadays, bear sightings are rare.

I remember camping at the Old Faithful Campground, suddenly we heard our mom screaming, standing on top of the picnic table. Because a big bear was lumbering through the camp, looking for food. I can remember this as if it were yesterday.

It was the weeks before my last year of college that I took myself to Yellowstone for the first time. Which is when the bear visited me in my Mustang.

That Roadtrip to Yellowstone had no particular destination. I remember hiking into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and remarking that this is one really grand canyon, let's go see the other Grand Canyon.

And so that Roadtrip headed south from Yellowstone, dropping in on Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park on the way to Grand Canyon. At that point in time I knew nothing about Bryce Canyon or Zion. They were a scenic revelation to me, the likes of which I did not know existed.

I have digressed away from Yellowstone. Yellowstone is big. On the first visit there were several surprises. One being how extensive the highway system is, complete with cloverleaf overpasses. And that there are several geyser basins, all with boardwalks.

I remember in one of the basins seeing a crowd gathered. A geyser was about to erupt that only did so every few weeks. Suddenly the water drained and then it erupted. People fled the blast of steam.

Yellowstone is heavily developed. The Old Faithful area is like a little town. But, you can easily get away from civilization.

I'm hoping a return Roadtrip to Yellowstone is in my near future.

Roadtripping History

Blogging about Roadtripping has me looking at old photos and thinking about Roadtrips over the span of decades. Like the Roadtrip in the picture. That is at Yellowstone National Park. In my now antique 65 Mustang Fastback.

That Mustang went on a lot of Roadtrips. It always managed to add to the adventure by having a mechanical problem at interesting times. Like once the clutch started slipping while I was driving up the hill to go down Lombard Street in San Fransisco. On another Roadtrip, in the same town, the Mustang overheated on the Oakland Bay Bridge. I had to stop on the bridge to cool it down and add water.

The best Mustang breakdown took place in Hollywood after watching a Laverne & Shirley taping at Paramount Studios. About 2 miles from the studio, that same clutch, that vexed me on Lombard Street, went in to total malfunction mode, right by a full service gas station. I coasted to a stop and waited til morning for the gas station to open. They were able to get it fixed by afternoon. That made for a day of wandering around Hollywood.

I'd learned that wandering around Hollywood was a fun thing to do, due to a car malfunction, years before, when I was 13, while on a family Roadtrip to Disneyland, the car had a problem while driving in Hollywood. So, my dad had it worked on at a gas station. Maybe it was the same one where I had my car worked on years later.

It was on the family Roadtrips, as a kid, that I learned the joy of Roadtripping. My mom and dad always made it totally anxiety free. We'd have a mechanical problem and it'd just become part of the trip. I remember our family trip to Yellowstone, a 64 Chevy Impala pulling an Arrowhead trailer. That Impala overheated going up super steep Deadman's Pass in northeast Oregon. It was a two-lane road then. Now it's Interstate 84 and it's still a steep climb and downhill ride.

On our first family Roadtrip to Disneyland we were only about 25 miles from home when the trailer axle broke. Did this end the trip? No. My dad took off the axle, found a guy to fix it in a town down the road a bit. It took a couple hours. My dad got the axle back on the trailer and we were back on our way. I can still remember this so clearly, back on the road and mom handing us homemade potato rolls with ham.

I think I'll quit blogging about Roadtripping right now and give my mom a call.