Tuesday night I finally made it back out onto the ice for another exciting game of adult league hockey. I missed one game while we were away exploring Europe and missed another last week due to a cold. So this was my first game of the season though my team had already played a couple of winless games. Though to their credit, the games were both close. In fact one of them ended in an overtime shootout. Things are definitely looking up for the team.

Despite the improvement in personnel for the team, I’m told the game on Tuesday was not much different than the previous two. Our new goalie played well. Our team played alright and put some pucks in the net, but we still managed to lose a close game. Final score was 4-3. I didn’t have any points in the game as I spent most of the game trying to learn how my new line mates played. I think with a little more time, our line will definitely start burying the puck!

This past Saturday we headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park to view the changing aspen trees and the annual elk rut, aka the elk breeding season. We took Cari, our roommate for the past month, along with us for her first visit to the park. Cari’s family are longtime friends with Kim’s family, and we are happy to welcome her for her two month stay in Denver. She is a pharmacy student at Ohio Northern, and is participating in an internship-like program. Her next adventure will take her to Kenya! I’ll have to encourage her to start a blog about her time there.

Anyway, I wanted to introduce the stranger that is in a few of these pictures. Though the park isn’t particularly known for it’s aspen groves, we were able to find a few bright gold spots, especially on our hike to the top of Deer Mountain. However the main reason I wanted to go to the park was to see the elk in their mating season. Before we even saw them, we could hear them loud and clear. The males have a very distinct call, which is known as bugling. Often, you can catch the males fighting with one another, using their antlers to show who is boss. We only caught a brief physical encounter between males, and it was at quite a distance, but you could feel the tension in the air. The females, however, could have cared less about the males and just continued feeding in the large fields.