A wintry woodsy retreat

Estes Park was a wintry woodsy retreat with a great combination of relaxing, exploring, seeing wildlife, experiencing below 0 temperatures in snow showers and time with Caleb! We stayed at McGregor's Mountain Lodge which was right down the road from one of the gateways into Rocky Mountain National Park. Originally when we planned the trip, we had decided to go up Saturday and spend 3 nights. Well, on Friday Caleb was ready to start vacation early and we knew winter weather was expected up at Estes Park so we thought it might be good to get there early. We called and the lodge had their biggest 1 bedroom cabin available for just Friday night so we stayed in that and they didn't charge us the extra rate for the bigger cabin. They said it was a first time welcome present. Great start to our time there.
We took a ton of pictures and I want to share so many of them here on my blog so I figure the best way to do this is write a couple posts about our experiences and do more of a picture journal layout for each post. Here we go about the start of our trip...

This was our cabin. It had a fireplace we burned fire in every night and a nice jaccuzi bath tub. So relaxing to have both of those and enjoy them in the evenings after being out in the cold.

Here are some more cabins and the area around our cabin. 

We had a friend one morning! This was Lefty the Elk. He was eating out of the bird feeder and then proceeded to eat out of each bird feeder that was in front of the cabins. One of the owners had just filled them all with birdseed. Apparently, this is a very common site at the lodge because in the guest journals in the cabins almost everyone had seen an elk eat out of the bird feeders at least once on their visits. There are 3 of the same elk that come around the lodge. Brat, Lefty, and Little Boy. The lodge even has postcards with these guys pictures.

Caleb used the zoom on the camera. You definitely don't want to risk getting close to the elk. I mean just look at those antlers!

Another day we saw the same elk as we pulled back into our lodge. He just walked right by the car window, looked at us, and kept on going. Elk are so much larger than I thought they were. 

On Saturday, our first full day we wanted to head right into Rocky Mountain National Park. Since it was Veteran's Day weekend, it was free to get into the park Sat, Sun, and Monday. Caleb's dad suggested we see Bear Lake in the park so that was the first place we headed too. Oh what fun we had there!

In Estes Park at about 7500 feet elevation, there were just some snow flurries falling. When we got up to Bear Lake in the national park at an elevation of 9450 feet, it was snow showers and wind coming down on us. We decided to still do the short 1/2 mile hike around the lake. We both said that hike was probably one of our favorite parts of the trip, although we did have many favorites. It was so fun walking with snow flying around us in the wind and it was freezing out, but that was what made it all so fun and adventurous to us southerners! Neither one of us had ever been in weather like that.

Caleb had a great time taking some neat photography shots as we did the 1/2 mile loop around the lake. Here are some of his pictures.

The sun trying to come through the snow clouds, but they were just too thick for it to shine.

We loved walking through this winter wonderland as our faces got wind burnt and our fingers were freezing. No, really we did love it! Caleb said he'd take mountain views and falling snow over sandy hot beaches any day. I said I'd have to agree with him on that one. We just loved this wintery cabin vacation. I will write another post next about our other 2 days in Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. We saw large herds of elk and went on a fun Colorado winter hike.