Colorado knowledge

Time for another "droppin some knowledge" post. I'll follow this up another time with some pics from my Colorado trip. A work trip, but lots of fun too.

1. Firs = flat & friendly (the needles)
2. Spruce = spinny & spiky (the needles - meaning that you can spin the needles in your finger)
3. Aspen trees have the ability to clone themselves. So an Aspen grove is generally all one tree - you can tell because they'll all change colors at the same time. They clone themselves as a way of adapting to conditions where there are not male & female trees nearby.
4. There's a Lodge Pole Pine beetle infestation in the Rocky Mountain National Park. The female beetles burrow into the tree and then bore up the tree, laying eggs along the way. The males burrow in and create a blue-green fungus along the outer edge of the tree. The larvae eventually burrow their way OUT of the tree. And... the tree dies. So a lot of the Rocky Mountain National Park has these "red" trees that are dead Lodge Pole Pines. And then yellow Aspen trees that are changing colors.
5. Lichen = algae + fungus. Some lichen grows 2 square inches every 100 years.
6. Elks do this crazy mating thing around this time of the year. The bulls kind of keep their cows all together and make sure that no other bull tries to steal them. Kind of herding their group. But to get the cows attention and kind of make themselves sound tough to other bull elk, they make this kind of eerie screeching sound called a "bugle."
7. There is tundra in Colorado.
8. There is snow on mountaintops in Colorado in September. There's even a range called the "Neversummer Range."
9. You can get many more types of New Belgium beer in bottles in Colorado than in California. Not a huge surprise, given that it's brewed in Fort Collins.