Labor Day Tallies

We celebrated the Labor Day holiday with a day trip into the mountains to do some Geocaching as a family. We had a great time and I took some awesome pictures. I’ll show you more later, but for now, it’s important that I report the tallies of the day.

Keeping tallies is something I learned to do from one of my long-time blogging buddies, Keetha, who used to blog at The Eclectic Company. She claims she’s lost her blogging fervor, so mostly she just tweets these days. It’s not the same, but at least she hasn’t completely fallen off the face of the internet earth. Anyway, she does still keep tallies, which is something, I guess. (Can you tell I’m just a little bitter about her giving up blogging?)

So… I had planned for and hoped that my Labor Day tallies would include lots of Rocky Mountain wildlife. Our route included miles of Forest Service dirt roads, which in Idaho would pretty much guarantee you plenty of wildlife sightings. Not so in Colorado. At least not within a day-trip’s distance from Denver. You see, even though it’s lovely wilderness, many other city people had the same idea we did. Get out of the city! Notice how many cars you can see going by on the dirt road behind our Highlander in the picture? Three! That’s way too much traffic for a remote mountain road. It just is.

And of course we had to drive a good distance on busy highways to access said remote mountain road. So this is what our tallies look like:

Wildlife:

• Bears – 0
• Moose – 0
• Elk – 0
• Antelope – 0
• Mountain Goats – 0
• Bighorn Sheep – 0
• Deer – 6
• Squirrels – 5
• Red Caterpillar – 1
• Herd of Buffalo – 1 (in a fenced pasture, of course)

Speaking of pastures, one weird thing we saw was a NASCAR flag, on a pole, in the middle of a cow pasture. What’s up with that?

Interesting People:

• Bicyclists – 50 (more or less, probably more)
• Dog Walkers – 8
• Hot Tubbers – 2
• Spitters – 1
• Huggers – 2

On the Road:

• RVs – 145
• Motorcyclists – 35
• ATVs – 2
• Horses with Riders – 0
• Wrecks – 2

As you can see, it was a disappointing day for wildlife sightings. However, we did find 12 Geocaches and a really neat, very old mountain cemetery.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts!