Day Six: June 15
My day got off to a nice start as I found this family taking advantage of the lawn outside my room.
Finally with a full day in the park thanks to an 8:00AM entry reservation, my plan was to hike a loop starting from Bear Lake, visiting a series of other lakes in this section of the park, all fed by runoff from glaciers high up in the passes around Hallett Peak (and, this time of year, spring snow melt as well).
I was fooled by the weather. The forecast called for sunny and warm. It was cloudy and chilly in the morning, but when I rechecked the weather report it still said warm and sunny, so I dressed expecting the morning clouds to burn off and the temperature to rise as the day wore on. I’d been fooled before, dressing for a chilly morning on a hike on previous visit, and ending up sweltering during a hot day. So this time I dressed for the sun, and it stayed cloudy and chilly the whole hike. Not badly so, but enough that I wished it was warmer. (The promised sun and warm temperatures did finally arrive: just as I got back to my car after the hike was done.)
The Bear Lake area is the starting point for a huge network of back country hiking trails, while the lake itself is the most popular destination in the park for casual visitors, so its parking lot tends to fill up early. The park service runs a free shuttle from a park-and-ride a couple of miles away. I had thought that with the reservation system and my 8:00AM time, I’d probably be able to park at Bear Lake; but no, it was already full when I got there. So I drove back to the park-and-ride and waited for the shuttle.
It may not look it from the photo, but parties were keeping a six foot distance from other parties in the line (the camera lens tends to foreshorten the image so it looks more crowded than it is), and masks were required to board the shuttle bus. Most people (not all) wore them in line as well.
With shuttle and temperatures discussed, here’s some pictures from my hike.
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The trail parallels a stream which feeds the series of three lakes along the way. In addition to the lakes, waterfalls are frequent along the way. |
| Nymph Lake, the first in the series of three along this trail. |  |
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As the trail climbed higher past Nymph Lake, there were still patches of snow on the ground, sometimes in large banks directly across the trail. There was a lot of slipping and sliding as hikers worked their way across the slippery, wet snow. |
| Here, a waterfall emerges from beneath a huge boulder beside the trail. |  |
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After passing the boulder, you can see that it fell across the stream at some time, creating a natural dam with a pond upstream, and the water draining below the boulder to create the fall on the other side. There were very large trout visible in the pond, but they don’t show up in any of the pictures I tried to take of them. |
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Dream Lake, the second of the three lakes found along this trail. The sharp peak in the background is Hallett Peak; the stream that the trail follows comes down originally from its slopes. |
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Emerald Lake, at the base of Hallett Peak. It’s named for the fact that it looks very green— when the Sun is out, which it wasn’t today.
Somewhere out of sight in that pass between Hallett Peak and the jagged peaks to the right is the Tyndall Glacier, the main source of the stream and the lakes. (From a map view, it looks like from this angle the glacier would be behind the peaks to the right; there’s nowhere to see it except by a multi-day backcountry hike.) |
The trail ended at Emerald Lake. Back down by Dream Lake, a branching trail leads to another lake and then connects to a different trail heading back down to the Glacier Gorge trailhead, where there’s another shuttle bus pickup. My original plan was to follow this branch, making a loop rather than retracing my steps. But the branching trail climbs over a high ridge, and when I got to it I decided I wasn’t up for another steep climb, so I called off the loop and headed back down the way I came.
On the way back down I encountered this bold little guy. The park service has signs posted everywhere not to feed the wildlife, but tons of people ignore that and this squirrel had obviously grown accustomed to being fed. He ran right up as soon as I sat down to eat some trail mix.
Then, just after I took this picture, he actually ran over and climbed up on my knee! That’s really not good— a wild animal that’s that bold could be sick (even if used to getting food from humans, they should be more skittish than that) so I quickly brushed him off and left the area.
That was the last adventure of note on today’s hike. As I mentioned up top, the sun finally came out and the temperature warmed up right around the time I got back to my car.
Driving back out of the park, I passed two spots for an extra couple of photos:
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On the left, Hollowell Park, and on the right Moraine Park. Rock Mountain National Park is dotted with these meadows— all called “parks” after the French parque, as much of the area was first mapped by French-speaking explorers.
Moraine Park is different from the rest of these meadows in that it’s a valley created by a glacier in the last ice age. The glacier piled up ridges of debris on either side, called “lateral moraines,” which now bracket the meadow and give Moraine Park its name. The low tree-covered ridge behind the meadow in the picture is one of these moraines.
So today brings my visit to Rocky Mountain National Park to a close. Tomorrow I drive on to Dinosaur National Monument, and though my route will take me over Trail Ridge Road in the park one more time, I don’t plan to stop. It’s going to be one of the longest drives of the trip— perhaps the longest, I’m not sure without looking it up. I’ll have a journal entry tomorrow if anything worth reporting happens, but it may be that the next report will be in two days.
ERROR CORRECTION: On yesterday’s trip report, I miscalculated the miles-driven-today, listing a number about half the actual there-and-back distance of driving Trail Ridge Road. I’m not going to edit yesterday’s post to correct the error, but I have corrected the total miles driven number for today.
Trip Report:
Miles driven today: 45
Total miles so far: 1065.1
