Mr Marmot

We spotted this little guy chomping along the trial up Eagle Peak. A marmot is kind of like a beaver of the mountains with scruffier hair and no flat tail.
And he was not afraid of us one bit. He blocked the trail for a good ten minutes before he let us pass.
It was hard to get good pics since these things lay so low to the ground. I wasn't about to get my face in marmot chomping range for the sake of my art. Think about you pet gerbil's big yellow chompers, multiply that times 100, and you've got marmot teeth.
Cute though!
From Wikipedia:

Marmots are generally large ground squirrels. Those most often referred to as marmots ten to live in mountainous areas such as the Alps, northern Apennines, Carpathians, Tatra, and Pyrenees in Europe, the Rockies, the Black Hills, and the Sierra Nevada in the United States, Northern Canada, Deosai plateau in Pakistan and Ladakh in India. However, the groundhog is also properly called a marmot, while the similarly-sized but more social prairie dog is not classified in the genus Marmota but in the related genus Cynomys.

Marmots typically live in burrows, and hibernate there through the winter. Most marmots are highly social, and use loud whistles to communicate with one another, especially when alarmed.

Marmots mainly eat greens. They eat many types of grasses, berries, lichens, mosses, roots, and flowers.

Thanks, Wikipedia! Way to go ground squirrels!
This guy definitely was not whistling any alarms. We were extremely low on his priority list. And as you can see he was going to town on those greens.
However, Wikipedia, I do have to say that this was our second marmot sighting, the other being near Estes Park in Colorado, and as an marmot expert I do have to say that on neither occasion did we spot these highly-social ground squirrels with a buddy in sight.