The Amazing Elk Migration
They were everywhere with more coming. Elk!
It was Christmas 2017, our first to be celebrated in Estes Park. As a family, we sat down below the antler chandelier around the rosewood table for a traditional holiday dinner with all the fixings including my favorite, sweet potato pie. Our family gathered with smiles of Christmas joy, when we looked out the window.
They were everywhere with more coming. Elk! From our dining room window, we could see them moving across Moraine Avenue, blocking the road, and wandering into our yard. It seemed like a hundred of them - maybe more.
Ignoring our warm, wonderful holiday meal, we rushed to the raised deck to watch the elk walking around and through the yard. Looking straight down, a cow stood staring up at us as curious as we were about her. It was a Christmas parade. Young elk, mature cows, and spike bulls were filling our yard with their presence and elk duds. I must have been a very good boy to get such a Christmas surprise.
That day, the food tasted delightful. There were laughs and giggles of a family not used to such surprise visitors as we retold our experience of the elk. It verified that our decision to buy a house in Estes Park was a perfect one. I was home.
Much to our delight, this was not the last time to experience the elk migration. A year later, around the first of November, my wife, Carolyn, and I were having dinner at Bird and Jim’s. Stepping out onto the deck, our jaws hung open as a group of maybe one hundred and fifty elk moved toward town from RMNP. As we watched in delight, another herd moved through the Country Market parking lot. Tourists pointed in amazement while we gathered our wits pretending to act like locals, explaining the migration. Soon, the two groups came together as we watched maybe 250-300 elk bunched together in the field.
The Migration Moved Along the Big Thompson River
Several years during the first week of November, the migration moved along Big Thompson River through Park River West, past Coffee on the Rocks, and into downtown Estes Park. We would pull into our development only to find elk everywhere blocking the road, eating branches from the trees, and trimming the dry grass. They surrounded my car, noses near the window and big bodies blocking my movement. They were beautifully intimidating and acted like they owned the road, which they did. As I asked myself how they had come to be in town, they were probably asking themselves, why my house was on their field.
This year, returning home by way of Estes Park Medical Center, standing packed together on an empty lot were a hundred or more. While they moved in a slight wave, they went nowhere except in a circle. As I photographed them, my zoom lens focused on a big bull in the middle. Standing tall among many, many cows, it looked like he was searching for one. Kind of a “Where is my girlfriend?” moment.
A few days later on a RMNPhotographer Tour returning from RMNP, we’d only seen a couple of elk in the distance. Our guests had hoped to see more, so I drove into town where I guessed I could find a couple or a hundred. Circling the round-about, I saw them coming across Highway 34 from the Stanley Hotel. I pointed and my guest squealed with excitement. The road was blocked, thick with elk as a large, dominant bull pushing from the back of the herd.
On the evening I wrote this, I had just returned from Loveland where before I reached the canyon along the river, among the trees there were an estimated two hundred. Cars lined the road watching their slow movements. It was a history lesson of what our land must have been like before Joel Estes settled in the valley.
This is our Estes Park. This is the home we share with deer, elk, moose, and other powerful animals and pesky varmint. Many mornings, I’m out photographing them, searching Rocky Mountain National Park for incredible animals and unique, beautiful images. And when I don’t see any in the park…
It’s not unusual to get a text from Carolyn. Last week, as I drove down Deer Mountain, my phone chimed. Pulling over, I looked at the text. “If you’re not seeing anything in the park, forty elk just walked through our yard and headed down to the river.”
I drove home to get some wonderful images of migrating elk.
