You can read the whole story of our road trip in Colorado and Utah here.
First things first, a video of our short stay in Rocky Mountain National Park:
August 27th.
After spending the night in Boulder it is time for our road trip to really begin. Our car is packed with food, and our hiking shoes are still smelling like flowers. We are ready!
Rocky Mountain National Park is very close to Boulder, it takes only an hour and a half to get there. I love living in Boston and I love the White and Green Mountains of New England, but there are no real mountains, more like cute hills. It’s a different story here.
I will camp, and I will like it (say it again)
Our first and only real goal of the day is to find a place to sleep. We’ve decided to camp this year, and the area we’d like to hike – Bear Lake – has a campground. At the entrance, the ranger gives us a map of the first come first serve loop: a few spots are still available. The loop is great, isolated from the rest of the camp, and faces the mountains. We pick our premium site.
Fire and grilled sausage are the secret for a good night of camping.
Close to the Moraine site, elks wander freely.
The hike of the day
1 hike, 4 cool names: Bear, Nymph, Dream and Emerald.
We pretend that we don’t see that a storm is right in front of us
Kms: 6
Level: easy, and busy. But it feels that there’s so much space that the crowd doesn’t bother us so much.
Weather: looking terrible, but it was actually fine.
Animal sightseeing : blue birds, chipmunks and its friend the squirrel.
Sprague Lake
Close to the Bear Lake area, we stop at Sprague Lake, and walk around. The light of the end of afternoon makes it even more beautiful, we call this the double rainbow awww effect.
August 27th
What we saw of the Trail Ridge Road
Too bad, the weather is shitty, cloudy and cold. We plan to cross the park from East to West on the Trail Ridge Road, a highway in the sky. 48 miles long, 12,000 feet high, but we don’t see much, except from some neon toundra on top. At the Visitor Center they warn us: the weather won’t change today. We are sad, but we leave.
Toundra and snow
Rocky Mountain National Park was very cool :
I wasn’t expecting much of this national park. I thought that Glacier National Park, further North but still on the Rockies, has fulfilled all my desires of cool mountains. I thought this stop would be just the first stop of our trip, before the great canyons of the west, but I was wrong. It was incredible, and we felt in vacation right away, disconnected from normal life – maybe high altitude gave me this feeling of feeling high and somewhere else, for real, far away from everything.
Our first impression of Colorado, after one night in Boulder, one night in Rocky Mountain NP, is LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. And it’s just the beginning.
We are officially West. See the French name “Cache la Poudre” (Hide the gunpowder – not sure about my translation though)?
