Colorado -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Outdoor books; Rocky Mountain National Park (Colo.) -- History; Rocky Mountains
This treeless realm is roamed by both the grizzly and the black bear;
both pay most visits during the autumn, and the grizzly occasionally
hibernates in these uplands. In summer they range the forests far
below, but with the coming of autumn they climb the slopes to dig out
fat woodchucks and to get the last of the season's berries, with which
to put on final fat for hibernating. They overturn stones for mice and
lick up the accumulations of chilled insects which they find along the
snow and ice fields. Myriads of flies, moths, grasshoppers, and other
insects often accumulate along or on the edge of snow or ice fields in
the heights, attracted, apparently, by the brilliant whiteness of the
ice or the snow. The cold closely surrounding air zone appears to
benumb or paralyze them, and they drop in great numbers near the
margin. Occasionally swarms of insects are carried by storms up the
heights and dropped upon the snow or ice fields which lie in the
eddying-places of the wind.
One autumn I accompanied a gentleman to the Hallett Glacier. On
arriving, we explored a crevasse and examined the bergschrund at the
top. When we emerged from the bergschrund, the new snow on the glacier
was so softened in the sunshine that we decided to have the fun of
coasting down the steep face to the bottom of the slope. Just as we
slid away, I espied a bear at the bottom, toward which we were
speeding. He was so busily engaged in licking up insects that he had
not noticed us. Naturally the gentleman with me was frightened, but it
was impossible to stop on the steep, steel-like, and snow-lubricated
slope. Knowing something of bear nature, the situation, though most
interesting, did not appear serious to me. Meantime, the bear heard us
and made lively and awkward efforts to be gone. He fled at a racing
gallop, and gave us an excellent side view of his clumsy,
far-outreaching lively hind legs going it flatfooted.
Deer are among the summer visitors in the cool uplands, climbing a
thousand feet or more above the uppermost trees. With the first autumn
snow they start to descend, and they commonly winter from three to six
thousand feet below their summer range. There are a few woodchuck
colonies as high as twelve thousand feet. The woodchuck, in the
spring, despite short legs and heavy body, gives way to _wanderlust_,
and as a change from hibernation wanders afar and occasionally climbs
a mountain-peak. Sometimes, too, a mountain lion prevents his return.
The silver fox is a permanent resident of these heights and ranges
widely over them. He catches woodchucks and ptarmigan and feasts on
big game that has met with accident or that has been left to waste by
that wild game-hog, the mountain lion. In summer, and occasionally in
winter, both the coyote and the wolf come into the fox's territory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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