... I will raise an additional possibility and that is you mention it was the distant ridges you were interested in and in that context, I find the island ROF distracting. You could crop it 
or remove it with CAF. ...
I included the peninsula for a couple of reasons. My initial thought was it added another layer of shading for a bit more depth. There are also a couple of kayakers along the shore, so as the eyes wander the frame there's a little something to discover and to provide scale. Of course, none of that's really necessary, as the ridges themselves are a good subject as you state. I could have tried moving left enough to clear the peninsula from view, but that would have put me on a narrow shoulder of the highway.
I made a couple of alternatives, both a mixture of cropping and cloning. In the first, I cropped about half the peninsula from the right edge and cloned out the remainder. In the second, I cropped from the bottom, taking off the bottom half of the peninsula and cloned out the rest. I generally don't do much cloning/healing other than spot removal, so I'm sure that could be improved.
... This would have been a great opportunity for telescopic compression to emphasize and isolate those beautiful ridges. An attractive image, IMHO.
Indeed. This was just laziness on my part. I had left my rental cottage down near Buena Vista and was hoping to get over Trail Ridge Road for an afternoon hike somewhere on the east side of Rocky Mtn NP. So I stopped for a quick snack and a quick photo op. But would have been just a couple minutes to grab my zoom.
