Tour Diary: Rocky Mountain National Park
On my last day off of the tour, I took a spin through Rocky Mountain National Park to spy some elk, get a good look at the mountains, and to take in one last deep breath of natural majesty.
I was up early on Monday morning. I enjoyed a bit of coffee with Laurie before prepping to hit the road. Laurie wished me the best of luck getting home and gave me a hug. I thanked her profusely for the hospitality and told her to relay the message to Jeremy as well. It was a treat to have spent a couple days with old friends, picking up as though we never left off.
It was less than 90 minutes to the city of Estes Park, and the entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park. As I pulled into town a few minutes away from the entrance to the park, I spied a massive herd of elk standing by the side of the road very near the main intersection in town. There must have been at least two dozen of them, including a handful of older males with very large racks of horns.
The elk are visible throughout much of the year in the park and surrounding areas, but in the fall they are especially active as they enter the rut, and males begin to vie with one another for the affection of a mate. In the morning light, they all appeared pretty tame and orderly. After a few minutes of blocking traffic, they eventually abated back to the adjacent golf course and forest.
Estes Park sits on the eastern side of the park, so I drove westward to begin to get the lay of the land. I stopped at the visitor’s center for a map and to stamp my parks passport like a nine year old on vacation with his folks. Although the main road that goes all the way through the park had just closed for the winter, the guide I spoke with gave me a few key spots to check out and focus on, including a handful of trails that would provide excellent vistas and perhaps a glimpse of some wildlife.
The weather was a bit chilly, but as the sun rose higher in the sky, I was very comfortable with just a flannel as long as I wasn't out for too long. Aretha and I flitted down the road slowly until we came to Sheep’s Lake. I walked along a trail for a half an hour or so through a patchy forest and into a wide, open meadow. Golden grasses, a few glacial rocks, and some groves of pines and cedar covered the flat meadow all the way to the base of a mountainous peak. Sitting within the valley of those jagged rocks, the quiet, peaceful meadow felt like an oasis.
Next, I moved on to Horseshoe Park, a larger meadow that sits in the center of a horseshoe shaped mountain range. I traipsed down a bit of the Horseshoe Park trail for a mile in one direction and then back again to get a deeper look at the terrain. Back near where I had parked Aretha, I found a footpath that led back to a small, lazy stream that crawls to a snail’s pace in the midst of the meadow. In the springtime, the water rushes through in buckets, but by the time the dry autumn arrives, there is only a trickle of water left running into the valley.
Thin, wispy, white clouds painted the top of a brilliantly blue sky. Occasionally, I saw other vehicles and happened upon other travelers on the trail, but down in the meadows especially, things were peaceful and I was able to find space just for myself with no distractions. It was lovely. I followed the winding mountain road up the slope as far as it would take us until we reached the closure just east of Rainbow Curve.
I parked the car and hopped out to run up to the viewpoint a few hundred yards away. As I wandered up the road past a few tourists, I caught an incredible view of the mountain range directly opposite where I was standing. I lifted up my phone and started to frame a photograph. I took a coupe of snaps but felt dissatisfied with the results. As I attempted to try a different angle, a middle aged man in a Wisconsin Badger windbreaker said, “You can’t really capture it in a photo, can ya?”
Chuckling at his remark, I replied, “It never quite feels the same as a two dimensional object, right?”
We began sharing tales of how we had reached this point in time together. Ron and his wife were out in the Denver area for their daughter’s wedding and they had decided to add a couple of days on take in Rocky Mountain. I congratulated him on the nuptials and shared a bit of my tales from the road. It was great to catch up with a fellow midwesterner, and to chat with someone who truly appreciated what they were getting the chance to witness. I got back in to Aretha and headed back down the hill to explore the area around Bear Lake Road.
I slowly made my way down the Bear Lake Road meandering the mountainous terrain with tenderness, hoping to save Aretha from further scrapes and bruises on the road. For more than an hour I wandered around the meadows and forests of Hollowell Park. I strolled among groves of birch trees and aspen. Black billed magpies flitted throughout the treeline and dotted the sky with fierce regularity.
Along a river bank, I plopped myself down in the sun and just sat for a while. I contemplated my travels all the way around the horn to Colorado. I looked back on the shows so far, and the friends and hosts I had been lucky enough to spend so much time with. I felt immense gratitude for getting to spend five days on the road with my mother. Sitting along a mountain stream in the sunshine, I felt lucky and thrilled to be at Rocky Mountain.
Eventually, I got to the end of the road near Sprague Lake and got out to take the mile and half walk around the circumference of the lake. The area is picturesque and calm. As I arrived the sun began to hide behind some high, slate clouds and a wind kicked up, dropping them temperature swiftly. A series of six or seven peaks sit as a backdrop to the south of the lake. A mountain with a glacial basin sits to the west of the lake and provides a stunning view near the end of the trail. The stroll around the lake took me about forty five minutes with a few quick stops for photos. Other than a few visitors that I passed on the trail, I was largely left to my own devices.
Sadly, my only view of wildlife had come entering Estes Park with the elk herd. There had been reports of bighorn sheep near a few of the trails that I visited, but on the day I was there I saw no activity. I did see scat from a variety of animals including elk, mule deer, and what I suspect was a black bear. My poop identity skills are a bit shaky these days, to be honest.
As I pulled out of Rocky Mountain, the sky began to darken again, and filled with dark gray clouds. Spots of rain plopped on the windshield in scattershot fashion. I exited the grounds back through Estes Park and found the elk had moved on while I was inside the park. I grabbed a quick sandwich for the road and began to make my way eastward for a Tuesday night show in central Nebraska.
The rains never really came, and as I rolled eastward, the sky began to brighten again just in time for sunset on the prairie. I watched the Rockies fade into the distance somewhere in the depths of my rearview. Flat land laid out in front of me like a welcome mat rolling toward my beloved midwest.
Cheers,
Matty C
What a freaking great adventure! Love the photos. Especially that fantastic image of the man himself.