Past Bear Lake Road, Highway 36 runs beside a low pine ridge that marks where an ancient glacier stopped, long before the last ice age. Ponderosas and scarred aspens stand along the road through the meadows, home to elk whose herd was brought in from Yellowstone, and Abert's squirrels work the older pines.
Beside this road runs a broad, low, pine-covered ridge about forty feet high. Broken boulders lie scattered through it. That's the end moraine of a glacier that came down the Big Thompson valley more than a hundred thousand years ago. It's older than the last ice age, and it marks where that ice stopped. The pines are ponderosas. On a warm day the older ones, with their cinnamon-red jigsaw bark, smell like vanilla or butterscotch, so give one a sniff at any pullout. The dark gray squirrels with the tufted ears are Abert's squirrels, and they depend on these trees. Elk eating the bark leave black scars low on the aspens, and where you see tall wire fences around trees, they're there to keep elk out. This herd came from Yellowstone. Settlers hunted the first elk hard for the Denver market, and by eighteen ninety few if any were left. Forty-nine were brought in just before there was a park. In the fall rut these meadows close for part of each day, so mind the signs. One more picture to carry up the hill. During the glacial advance the forests retreated downslope, and tundra may have reached as low as eight thousand feet, about the height of these meadows. So the treeless country at the top of this road may once have started right about here, with forest and mammoths and bison out on the plains behind you.
Photo: NPS Photo / Ann Schonlau, VIP · Public domain