Estes Park snowshoeing

Endovalley, RMNPOriginally uploaded by bleffler

On Tuesday we drove into Rocky Mountain National Park over to the Bear Lake trailhead. We snowshoed up to Emerald lake, which was about 1.8 miles one way. It was a little more aggressive in some spots than what we were use to. Last year we went to the same trailhead, but went to Lake Bierstadt. That trail was nice and was downhill initially.

On Wednesday we drove back into the park and went to the Lawn Lake trailhead. We hiked up about 1.4 miles to where the trail splits. At that point you can go to either Ypsilon Lake or Lawn Lake. We didn’t go to either lake because they were a few more miles away. Lawn Lake has some interesting history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_Lake_Dam

At an early stage of this trail, we came across some blood drops that accompanied a set of tracks that belonged to a Mountain Lion. The tracks zig-zagged across the trail several times until we finally saw them leading to a small rock outcropping. We were really intrigued by this because the night before we were watching one of those nature programs on big cats of the world.

some post-Chanukah thoughts

Towards the end of Chanukah this year, I started to think about the whole story involving the oil. I was thinking that maybe there was a connection, a common thread, to other miraculous stories involving oil. The two that came to mind were in I Kings 17.14-16
and in II Kings 4.1-7.

I spoke with several different rabbi’s that I know and none had any thoughts off the top of their head. So I didn’t really pursue it much after that and was kinda just hoping that somewhere along the way I would hear something….

…sure enough, not more than a week goes by and I make my weekly journey over to Rabbi Berel Wein’s page. He also had some post-Chanukah thoughts, which I thought tied in nicely…

http://www.rabbiwein.com/Jerusalem-Post/2007/12/279.html