{"id":6948,"date":"2020-09-30T09:16:30","date_gmt":"2020-09-30T15:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/?p=6948"},"modified":"2020-09-30T09:16:43","modified_gmt":"2020-09-30T15:16:43","slug":"a-day-in-the-forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/a-day-in-the-forest\/","title":{"rendered":"A Day in the Forest"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Today I decided to take a Mental Health Day for myself. I haven’t taken the time to drive up to the mountains to see the turning leaves for several years, and I decided today I needed to get away from the email, the internet, and the news…and do some Forest Bathing. Mason our oldest son came with me, so we had time to catch up on some larger topics in our lives.

We drove up Golden Gate Canyon to the Scenic Byway called the Peak to Peak Highway, and continued on towards Longs Peak and Estes Park. Along the way we were thrilled to see a Bald Eagle circling over the forest, and there were many groves of Aspen turning gold.

I have an Annual Pass for the Rocky Mountain National Park this year, as a way to help support the struggling park system. We turned off into Wild Basin, and snapped some photos of a fly fisherman down in the clear mountain stream. We drove along the dirt road and found a place to picnic, and were joined by 2 dazzling Sapphire Blue Jays who undoubtedly were wishing we’d toss some crumbs from our picnic lunch. The sky was blue, the Ponderosa Pines whispered in the soft breeze, the birds twittered, and I was able to leave the world behind for a few hours…

As we descended into Estes Park, we started to see the herds of elk, each one with a large buck, many cows and calves. To the North we saw the column of smoke from the 125K acre Cameron Peak Fire.

The photo above is the biggest buck we saw. He was hanging out by the lake with his harem, bugling to warn off younger bucks circling on the periphery. He limped as he walked – his harem of cows and calves were hard won, no doubt. But wow, he was a big boy.

We drove down towards home, and once we were driving along the foothills, we saw another column of smoke from the Williams Fork fire Southwest of Boulder. Today the wind was blowing due East, and so we are sitting between 2 columns of smoke, relatively clear until the wind changes again. That’s just how I feel after my day out in Nature…in a clear space while the storm rages around us. I hope you are able to find some time to center into a calm clear moment, in Nature, sewing, making art, or spending precious moments with your loved ones.

with hope for the future…
Luana and Paul

p.s. The photo was taken with a telephoto lens!<\/p>\nShare Post:<\/strong>
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Today I decided to take a Mental Health Day for myself. I haven’t taken the time to drive up to the mountains to see the turning leaves for several years, and I decided today I needed to get away from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animals","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6948"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6950,"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6948\/revisions\/6950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.equilter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}