🦌 Rocky Mountain: What You Will Find

Rocky Mountain National Park is in Colorado, covers a little over a thousand square kilometres, and is cut through by the continental divide: water from the western side reaches the Pacific, water from the eastern side the Atlantic.

Over four million people come each year. Since 2020 you enter at peak times on a timed entry — you reserve a particular window, or you are turned around at the gate. The rules change and it is worth checking beforehand.

The Road Above the Treeline

Trail Ridge Road is the highest continuous paved road in the American national park system and one of the highest continuous paved roads in the United States. It climbs to 3,713 metres and runs for about fifteen kilometres above the treeline.

It is the part people come for, because you can drive to somewhere it takes half a day to walk to elsewhere. On the other hand it is open only from roughly the end of May to October; the rest of the year it is under snow, which is cleared in May by rotary ploughs into walls higher than a car.

At the top is alpine tundra. The same things grow here as beyond the Arctic Circle: low cushions, mosses, lichens. A plant the size of your palm may be a hundred years old, and a footstep that means nothing elsewhere takes decades to heal here. That is why there are boardwalks everywhere, and why people actually stay on them.

At 3,700 metres the atmospheric pressure is about 65 per cent, so with every breath you take in roughly two thirds of the oxygen you would at sea level. Anyone who drives straight up from Denver usually notices.

Elk That Bugle in Town

Several hundred elk live in and around the park — North American deer that are far larger than European ones.

The rut is in September and October and the bulls bugle. It is not the deep roar of a European red deer but a high, piercing whistle that carries across the whole valley and sounds almost unearthly in the evening.

More interesting is where it happens. The elk have worked out that in the town of Estes Park below the park gate no shooting is allowed, and so in the rut they simply are there: on the golf course, on the roundabout, on the lawn in front of the town hall. The town deals with it through signs and a reasonable amount of fatalism.

Besides them there are moose, which came here in 1978 from Utah and Wyoming, bighorn sheep, marmots and pikas — small relatives of the hare that live in scree, whistle, and dry hay into stacks under the rocks for the winter.

Longs Peak

The only mountain in the park over fourteen thousand feet — in Colorado such summits are called "fourteeners" and there are more than fifty of them. Longs Peak is 14,259 feet, that is 4,346 metres.

The route to the top is twenty-three kilometres there and back with over fifteen hundred metres of ascent, and the last section goes through a rock window called the Keyhole along ledges above a drop. It is not climbing, it is exposure. People set off at two or three in the morning, because storms come through after midday and being above the treeline then is a bad idea.

Water That Flows to Two Oceans

On the western side of the park, in the Kawuneeche valley, the Colorado rises — the river that fifteen hundred kilometres further on carved the Grand Canyon and supplies both Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Here it is a brook you can step over.

The Stanley Hotel

A little below the park, in Estes Park, stands a white hotel of 1909. In 1974 a writer spent a night there with his wife; they were the last guests before the winter closure and slept in a practically empty building. That writer was Stephen King and he then wrote The Shining.

The hotel has made a whole business of it: room 217 is booked months ahead, the film runs on a loop in the corridor, and there is a hedge maze on the grounds that was added much later — precisely because people kept looking for it.

What the Park Has Been Through Lately

In October 2020 the East Troublesome fire jumped the continental divide — across bare rock above the treeline, which was considered impossible. In one day it covered eighteen kilometres. On the western side of the park whole slopes of dead trunks are left from it.

Before that, millions of pines here were killed by a bark beetle that mild winters stopped harming. So the grey forests you will see on the way are not one season's illness but the result of two different things at once.