The sheep and goat show is great for visitors, maybe not so great for the animals. Some of the bighorns boldly walked up to our car window, expecting to be fed. Obviously they had been, and often enough to develop a begging habit.
That can be a fatal habit, a forest ranger once told me, especially for the newborns. They hang around the road, feeding from cars all summer, then starve in the winter when the cars go away.
The highway was closed at Summit Lake this month, five miles from the mountaintop, so seeing them now may require some high-altitude walking. Here's hoping the little ones have time to learn how to live on a tundra diet.
Rats. I went to Yosemite National Park in May for a reunion hike with two high school friends and came back thinking the only painful memory would be our failure to get within three miles of the Half Dome summit.
Read more of David Olinger's story in the Denver Post.
(Copyright 2012 The Denver Post)