Lake Mary, Wednesday, July 6

So, Carrie has been talking about seeing elk in the Flagstaff area for weeks. We hadn't seen any in the 10 or so days we'd been in Flag, so we decided to make a specific drive for the purpose of seeing elk. I did a little research and found out that Lake Mary is a good place to see them.

When Carrie, Dick and I were a few miles before Lake Mary, we saw cars pulled onto the shoulder and then we saw them!! Elk! There were three elk up pretty close to the road and about six or eight farther back in some trees. We took pictures and pinched ourselves and giggled and high-fived each other.

We weren't ready to go back "home" yet, so we continued down the road to Lake Mary. There is "lower" Lake Mary, which was a totally dry, grassy lake bed and "upper" Lake Mary, which had lots of water and boaters. We now know that we don't really give a rip about "upper." We stopped at "lower" and saw a herd of elk that was probably 50 in number. I think they were probably 100 yards from us. We thought we'd been thrilled before, but now we were ecstatic! The elk were grazing and making strange squawking noises that we first thought were birds.

Then, we drove on and saw another herd that must have had between 100 and 150 elk! I thought I was going to levitate right off the face of the earth! It was almost completely dark by then, but I kept insisting on trying to photograph them. My pictures look like crap, so I tried to imprint the sight permanently on my retinae. There were young elk that were playing with each other, cavorting and hopping and running like they were playing tag. It was breath-taking to watch. We finally left when we couldn't see each other, let alone the elk. We went out to dinner and bored the server with our pictures, but he could tell we were excited, so he played along with us. It was a great experience that we won't forget.