Rocky Mountain National Park

It has been 44 years since my first visit to Rocky Mountain National Park. Today will be my fourth visit – the most visits to a National Park outside of the eastern United States. It remains every bit as scenic as that first time I visited, though with far less snow (my first visit was in March 1979 on Spring Break).

Unfortuntely, this is one of the parks that is being loved to death. It had become common for people to wait up to an hour just to get through the entry gate. They then faced crowds wherever they stopped. Last year, the park tried a new solution – timed entry reservations.

This required making a reservation in advance of your trip, reserving a two-hour window on a specific day at which time you could enter the park. Reservations for a particular month opened on the first of the previous month. Needless to say, at 10:00 am on July 1, I was online getting my reservation for my planned day. The reservation is “free” though the recreation.gov website (which handles most public lands reservations) charges a $2.00 fee.

I had a beautiful morning as I entered the park – clear skies and a bit cool. There was a haze in the air that prevented some scenic landscape photos from being as crisp as I would have liked. I still took several photos along Trail Ridge Road – the main road through the park. Clearly the reserved times policy was working as I was very seldom in any sort of traffic, and found parking available at every stop I made.

Well, almost every stop. There were no available spaces at Milner Pass on the park’s west side. This is where the Continental Divide crosses the road. There is a sign indicating the point where water poured to its left heads to the Atlantic and to its right ends up in the Pacific. On previous visits, I seem to recall a smaller and empty parking space as the sign was easy to see and photograph. Now there are parking spaces directly in front of it requiring any photo to be taken at an angle.

The biggest issue I had was breathing! At its highest, I was over 12,000 feet (3,660m) above sea level having flown in 36 hours earlier from my home at 70 feet. I took my time whenever I was out walking about and had no major problems.

As I neared the park exit on the southwestern corner, I passed through a large area of dead trees – the remnants of a major fire in 2020.

Just after leaving the park, I passed Lake Granby and crossed a very small stream. It was actually the Colorado River whose headwater was the lake. Best known for its work in Arizona, the Colorado River will pop up several time over my next few days, doing some rock carving in Colorado and Utah before reaching its most famous work of erosion.

Steve