Visiting Fall

Started: 2025-10-28 20:00:39

Submitted: 2025-10-28 21:52:30

Visibility: World-readable

Visiting Rocky Mountain National Park, along with the seasons of fall and winter

When I made travel arrangements to visit Fort Collins to take Calvin on a college tour at Colorado State University, I left Saturday open to visit something in Colorado before heading back home to Santa Cruz on Sunday. My vague thought was that we could go visit Rocky Mountain National Park, because it's one of my favorite places to visit (and because Calvin expressed an interest in seeing snow). That was back when I thought we would have a federal government. But the administration decided to open the gates and not charge admission, and the local park conservancy group funded the trash pickup and cleaning restrooms in the park. The people who would actually update the website and social media (or even respond to media inquiries) with the state of the park were furloughed, but there were enough local news reports to give me an idea of what I ought to expect.

We stopped for snacks at Safeway, then drove south to Loveland then headed up US 34 into the Big Thompson River canyon. (I've driven this road once or twice before, but most of the time when I visited Rocky Mountain National Park I was starting in Boulder County so US 36 was the obvious choice.) When we reached Estes Park we passed the No Kings protest on Elkhorn Ave. There was at least one inflatable costume that looked like a skeleton version of the Portland Frog (maybe for Halloween?), and at least one sign referencing the frog with the caption "Don't let democracy croak". (I did not see the bull elk that joined the protest but I read about them later on social media.)

The park entrance was staffed but not charging admission. They asked if I had been to the park recently; I had not (not for almost ten years; but all they were checking was whether to tell me about the current state of the park while the federal government was shut down) and gave me a page listing hikes by region and difficulty. I drove into the park and headed up Trail Ridge Road. As the road climbed above the glacial valleys into the sub-alpine forests I began to see a few flakes of snow. I drove to the end of the road, at Rainbow Curve, where a gate closed off the rest of the road, apparently due to snow higher up the road.

Immediately beyond the closure the road looked clear and dry, but snow lurked along the sides of the road and in the forest next to the road, and the curve hid most of the road from view. We were were around 10,800 feet; around the corner the road climbed into the alpine zone above treeline and snow would drift high above the road in the winter.

From the roadside parking lot perched on the side of the mountain we could see into the valleys to the east. Snow flurries fell from low clouds. The air was cold and invigorating.

We had come to visit the season of "winter".

We drove down Trail Ridge Road and turned up the Bear Lake Road. To manage congestion on the Bear Lake corridor the Park Service had set up timed entry tickets, which they had planned to continue to tomorrow, but the timed entry tickets were a casualty of the government shutdown. (This basically worked out because I didn't have a timed ticket; but in the absence of the government shutdown I would have looked up tickets in advance and I might actually have one after all.) I parked at the shuttle parking lot, which was fairly full for the middle of October. We caught the next standing-room-only shuttle heading up the road to Bear Lake ("just like MUNI" I commented).

I picked a short but rewarding hike to Emerald Lake, leaving from the Bear Lake parking lot along the crowded trails leading into the forest (news reports indicated that it was more crowded because of the shutdown, because the park was free). I've hiked along this trail many times before (most recently ten years ago when Calvin was six and Julian was four months old) but this was when I lived in Colorado and I had adapted to the thin mountain air. I made a deliberate effort to pace myself and stay hydrated and fed. It helped that the trail was crowded with people so I couldn't really go especially fast anyway. (It was harder to complain about the slow-moving tourists on the trail when I was one of them.)

The first stop along the trail was Nymph Lake. In the summer this small lake is covered in lillypads; now in the fall all that remained were the stalks sticking out of the water, with a few dying leaves littering the surface of the lake.

The trail continued above Nymph Lake, climbing up the hillside with a dramatic view of Longs Peak surrounded by its buttress peaks (including Half Mountain, the prominent point to the left of the picture, which I had to look up on my map when I got home because I didn't immediately remember it). I've climbed the other peaks pictured here: Longs Peak (three times), Pagoda Mountain, and Thatchtop; and it was great to be back in Colorado visiting the mountains.

When we reached Dream Lake there was a stiff breeze blowing over the lake, strong enough to kick up white caps on the quarter-mile-long lake. (I can't say that my built-in wind speed indicator is especially well calibrated but I'd guess the wind was on the order of 30 to 40 knots.) The wind was sufficiently unpleasant that I barely spent enough time at the side of the lake to get a picture, before retreating to the relative shelter of the trail in the woods at the side of the narrow valley.

We hiked past Dream Lake and onward to Emerald Lake. At the shore of the lake the wind was a gentle breeze, so we sat and ate a snack while fending off the pika that were marauding for snacks to prepare for the winter. (I knew better than to feed the wildlife, but at Rainbow Curve someone tried to feed the pika a snack right in front of the sign that forbade feeding the pika. I was not impressed.)

At 10,000 feet, just below Emerald Lake, we had descended a season and we were now visiting fall.

The trail back to the trailhead was easier than climbing up; we had gravity on our side, and the trail was easy to navigate. Back at the parking lot we caught the next shuttle bus down to where we'd parked; and on the bus I finally saw Chiefs Head Peak on the long ridge west of Longs Peak, one of the few mountains in the park that I've climbed more than once. (I love all of Colorado's mountains, but Chiefs Head is one of my favorites.)

We drove back to Fort Collins and headed into Old Town for supper at Tasty Harmony, a vegan restaurant; then wandered around Old Town a bit as part of the vibes survey of the town. I saw a boutique clothing store named "Blue Harvest", which I recognized as the code name for Return of the Jedi to obscure the fact that they were really filming a Star Wars movie; it was supposedly a horror movie with the tagline "horror beyond imagination".

I was pleased to get the opportunity to visit Rocky Mountain National Park, and Calvin seemed amused by it as well, so I'm going to consider that a win.