Rocky Mountain National Park in northern Colorado spans the Continental Divide
and encompasses protected mountains, forests and alpine tundra.
Tucked in Colorado to the west of Estes Park sits Rocky Mountain National Park and its over 415 square miles of protected mountain terrain with a huge network of hiking trails & wildlife. While I’ve been visiting Colorado since I was a young kiddo I had never visited in the summer and never had the chance to visit the park. So on this way to quick basically 48 hour trip to Denver I set aside a day for adventures and off we went. Just the drive from Denver to the Estes Park area was beautiful. Lush valleys and deep shades of greens and endless trees. Beautiful. But once you pull into the entrance (we chose the Estes Park entrance) it’s a whole other world. You’re suddenly tucked in between the mountains that tower above you and there’s tundra and views. It’s unreal. We had plans of hitting Dream lake but since park entrance is currently based on a timed permit system we were turned away on the road towards the lake due to how business it was. We wandered a bit before discovering that we could head up into the park and then off the paved path and on to an off road dirt path called the Old Fall River Road. Old Fall River Road is about 9 miles of curves and switchbacks, is only a 1 way road since it’s so narrow and is only open from early July to about September depending on weather. So up we went and oh the views we found. It was so quiet, like we had the park to ourselves each time we stopped. We found open valleys and trails, streams and waterfalls and we thought it was all amazing until we were upon the best part: snow. There was snow at about 11,000 ft just before making it to the Alpine Visitor Center. The temperature had dropped. The wind was howling. But the view was beautiful beyond words. It’s a whole other world in there.
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