2020 Road Trip Journal: Rocky Mountain National Park 1

Day Four: June 13

Today did not go as planned, although it managed a partial recovery by the end.

The drive from Colorado Springs to Estes Park was comparatively short, for a “drive day.” I expected to arrive by noon and go straight into the park for a half-day before checking in at the lodge where I’m staying. I’ve been to Rocky Mountain National Park before (I was here on my 2015 epic road trip, and again on a one-park trip a couple of years later) so I wasn’t planning to spend a lot of time seeing the whole place. A quick run around the major points today, and then day hikes the next two.

I got to Estes Park at noon as expected… but there I found a chunk of the highway that leads into the park closed for construction, requiring a traffic-jammed detour right through the town’s Main Street; I noticed the sidewalks were positively jammed with people (all wearing masks, but still), and finally I learned that RMNP is controlling the numbers of people who enter by requiring reservations, which you have to make online. They weren’t doing this when I checked a few days before my trip began, it must be a new decision. I’ll have to keep an eye on the upcoming parks on my trip, so I don’t get caught out again.

Worried that I’d be unable to visit the park at all— who knows how soon the available spots book up?— I grabbed my phone and went to the online system: fortunately they weren’t all booked up for today, but the earliest I could get into the park would be 3:00.

So I went to the lodge first and checked in. Fortunately, though I was three hours early for the listed check-in time, my room was ready and they were happy to let me go ahead.

I stayed at this same place the last time I was here. At right, this is what’s right outside my room’s back door. Now you know why I’m back. It’s called Aspen Winds if you’re every looking for a place on a trip of your own, and it’s a family business.

So things were at least partly looking up. I went back online to get entry times for the rest of my stay here, and I won’t be able to get into the park tomorrow until 2:00. Really too late to start on a planned all-day hike, not to mention that I have no idea what I’ll do with myself tomorrow until then. I got better news for Monday, I got an 8:00AM entry, and another 8:00AM for Tuesday (I’ll be traveling on Tuesday, but my route leads through the park, so I needed that morning entry! It would be a massive detour to go around it, on a drive that will already be one of the longest ones of the trip.)

That leaves me with two half-days and only one full day. I’ll have to decide what hike I want to do that one day. Meanwhile, I’ll just have to make the best of my two half-days.

	Every cloud has a silver lining, they say, and here’s one. I entered the park at 3:00 per my reservation, and there was a moose grazing in the meadow near the entrance. Moose are not common in this park, so it was a real bonus.
I then drove over to the Alluvial Fan area: a favorite spot of mine in this park. I told the story of the flood that created it in my 2015 Road Trip reports, no need to repeat: you can read it here.

Thunderstorms were rolling in as I returned to my car; when the storm broke I parked and waited out the rain, which passed in a few minutes.

Petrichor (n): the smell of earth after a rain.
That’s a word I first heard in an episode of Doctor Who, and I thought at the time the writer had made it up, just a bit of the Doctor’s technobabble. But it’s a real word, and if ever I wanted to know what it was like, I learned when I got out of my car at Upper Beaver Meadow just as the rain finished. The air was positively drenched in it, it was really wonderful. Cameras need a scent attachment.

I next drove over to Bear Lake, stopping to look at this and that along the way. Here are some more pictures, without specific comment.



	So that’s today’s adventure. Tomorrow, I’ll… well, figure out how to fill up the time until 2:00, and then see what I can do with a second half-day in the park.