A Magical Date Night....

Well Dave & Kathy offered to take Gingersnap & Zac after his baseball game Saturday night so Jeff and I could have a date night. So off to the  mountains we went.  We started the evening sitting on the park bench by the river that runs through the edge of town where I read my book and Jeff practiced his songs on the guitar.  Then we went to dinner at the Wapiti Pub.  After this we went back to our park bench and realized that there was too much light in town to see the stars.  So we got back in the jeep and headed to the mountains.  Lucky for us it was about 10pm and the rangers had gone home for the night so we drove into the Moraine area of RMNP.   We watched the stars and listened to the stream a while later we hear an elk bugle.  So we decided to drive back up towards the grassy area of Moraine and see if we could see any elk.  It was about 10:45 pm as we sat and listened to the elk there were 3-4 that were bugeling.  Then the one that sounded like it was above us and one below us in the tree line, one farther out and one like it was much farther away.  So we drove up to the top of the Moraine park area and sure enough there was an elk grazing.   While there the elk that was farther down in the tree line was quite loud he was bugeling and bugeling non stop.  The other elk would chime in here and there but that guy was the noisest.  Then Jeff tapped me on the shoulder and pointed across the street from where we were parked and there was a coyote. He sat across from the jeep and looked at us then barked and then he howled.  While he was howling there were others in the park that started howling too.   It was so amazing. Then after this a big bird (we are thinking it was an owl)  flew right over the front of the jeep and landed on this rock about 100 feet away as we had heard owls too while listening to the elk.   It was a magical evening listening to the animals in the park.