Tuesday September 10th 2019
It was a sunny day today with a high temperature in the high sixties. I was surprised by how nice a day it turned out. The TV weather forecasts for most of Oregon come from TV stations based in the central valley. The stations in this area are all translators from the Portland area. The central valley area got heavy rain today, so that is what the TV stations focused on. I suspect that people local to this area can pick out the few sentences of the forecasts that apply to the coastal area, but I seemed to have missed them.

I spent the day at home doing a few cleaning and maintenance chores. For exercise I took a couple of walks through the campground. It is really showing that we are in the slower fall season. During the middle of the day the campground is closer to empty than full. A good number of travelers arrive in the evening, but most seem to leave in the morning.

On the first walk through the campground I met some visitors. A group of four elk were slowly walking through the park taking a nibble from a bush here and there. People didn’t seem to concern them at all. One young bull continued to eat from the bushes as he approached me. He got within twenty feet of my location before he changed direction a little. I was taking pictures, not doing anything threatening, so he just went about his business. His three female friends seemed equally at ease with people. I’m not sure of elk social order, but one of the females was a little bigger and may have been the mother of one or more of the others. They spent more than an hour in the campground before they left in the general direction they came from.
Afternoon visitors. A young bull. His antlers still have velvet and aren’t as big as older elk at this time of year. Visitors leaving the park an hour or so later.