Contentment by design - Living

We enjoyed a wonderful hike up in the Lumpy Ridge area of Rocky Mountain National Park today (Lumpy Ridge is the area behind the Twin Owls rock formation that you can see beyond the Stanley Hotel when you're in Estes Park). We were greeted with clear skies to begin with in the cool morning. Later in the day as the temp started climbing, clouds rolled in to keep us cool, and then thunderstorms started forming. It started raining just as we reached our car for the drive home. Perfect timing!

There was an incredible abundance of wildflowers in bloom along the entire trail. Recently, some people in the office gave a presentation about macro photography. I don't have a macro lens (yet), but was inspired by their examples to get as close as I could to many of the flowers I saw. We also saw a lot of Monument Plants (Green Gentian), including one that had produced a flower stalk; however, some critter had bitten off the flower head. This is a crazy plant: it grows for around 20 - 60 years, then flowers and dies!

At the beginning of the hike, we followed an old, now closed, ranch road up into the valley through which Cow Creek flows.