Saturday September 23rd
I awoke and made breakfast, witnessing a beautiful scene with the sun starting to come onto the mountains. It was still pretty chilly.
I drove back to the highway and headed north, destination Rocky Mountain National Park. I went through a fair sized place called Leadville, where I got fuel. From there it was about a two hour drive to the park entrance, going up and over another pass, by Copper Mountain, another ski resort, briefly back onto I-70, with a long climb up and over another range, then through some little towns, and by the large Lake Granby before getting to the town of Grand Lake.
The town was next to two lakes, Shadow Mountain Lake, which the road went by, and Grand Lake itself. As with many lakes, a lot of the lake shore had houses along it, which would have had lovely views. It was pretty just from the road too.
The National Park entrance was just out of Grand Lake, and I arrived about 11, and as I recall it didn’t take long to get through. They checked my timed entry pass, which allowed me to enter between 10 and 12, and off I went. My pass also covered the Bear Lake area, which was part of the park, but apparently so popular that you had to explicitly get a pass for that area. You could get a pass without that area, perhaps there were more limited numbers of people allowed in there. I wasn’t sure if I also had to get to Bear Lake by 12, and along the way I asked another visitor who also had a Bear Lake pass, who said that you could enter Bear Lake any time. So I didn’t rush my trip to Bear Lake, which was probably a good thing, but it turned out this advice was wrong!
The road was quite windy in some places, as it got up to nearly 12,000 feet again. In some places there was still ice along the sides of the roads, and I think the temperature outside was around one or two degrees. I stopped for the views at a few places, and went for a short walk at a spot that was near the highest point of the road. This was cold and extremely windy!
Everyone was rugged up, fighting against the wind on the walk to the summit. It was only about 15 minutes. There were some large rocks at the top which you could climb up, but you had to be very careful with balance, with the gusting wind!
I got to the entrance to the Bear Lake road, about 1pm, and there found out that I had needed to be there by 12. Thankfully after 2pm if you had the pass to go in, you could enter, even if it wasn’t your time slot. So I turned back a little way to Beaver Meadows to make some lunch, along what turned out to be a pretty awful dirt road, so I found a car park close to the entrance. You couldn’t walk in the meadows, but it was a nice view, and the day had turned out beautifully sunny again.
I arrived back at the entry gate as close to 2pm as I could manage, thinking there might be a line up of other people wanting to get in. There were in fact a few cars queued up already when I got there a couple of minutes after 2, so I think that was indeed the case, but I got through fairly quickly thankfully. The road went to a car park part way along, which had signs saying that the car park at the end, by Bear Lake, was full, and to take the shuttle bus. So I hopped on one, which I think was waiting there, and was the only passenger! No one else turned up, so I had a nice chat with the driver as he drove there. There was in fact space in the end car park, and he said that they never take the signs down!
Bear Lake was pretty, with pine trees around it, and some autumn colour here and there, probably aspens. It was at 9,500 feet, and again I had a hike to 10,000 feet, a similar hike to the one the previous day, also through some beautiful autumn colour, and mountain scenes. It took about three quarters of an hour to get to the destination, Emerald Lake.
On the way, I passed Nymph Lake, a little one with water lilies on it, then Dream Lake, with a beautiful blue-green glacier colour, and mountains in the background, then on to Emerald Lake itself.
I arrived just in time to see the sun still on it, showing its emerald colour, before the sun sank behind the mountains that surrounded it. It was a fairly small lake, in a kind of crater, and I climbed a fair way up a rocky incline to get a look at it from above.
After hiking back, and catching the return shuttle bus, it was time to get to my campground for the night, in Denver, about two hours drive away.
The route went through Estes Park, and then down a one-lane-each-way road with quite a lot of traffic on it, and some line-ups when slow vehicles were in front. From there I think I went through the city of Boulder, then onto more major highways through Denver to Cherry Creek State park, a bit south of the CBD, to the East entrance, with its own intersection on the four-lane highway going by it. I knew I needed a parks pass as well as having paid for camping, so when I came to the entrance gate, I asked the person there if I could pay for a two-day pass. He said I should try the camping office.
I arrived near sunset, maybe around 6.45pm, and I was keen to get to the campground before dark, as it gets harder to find things, and to back the van in, if it’s a narrow spot. So I set off to find the office, using oogle to find the park office, and did eventually get there – the park is huge – and found it had closed a couple of hours ago! I ended up in some parking area where I had to get out and remove a traffic cone to get out again, and then set off in search of the campground, which I also had trouble finding, while I got increasingly frustrated as the light faded.
I did eventually find the campground, then I set about trying to find my site. There were a number of different loops, each for a range of camp sites, but nowhere could I find a loop with my site on it, 150. None of them went up as high as that. I finally found a camp host caravan, and thank the Lord was able to rustle up the camp host, though it was probably after 7 by then. She tried to explain to me where the site was, but I couldn’t work it out from her directions, and so far as I could see, I had explored each loop.
So she very kindly got dressed for going outside and came and walked over to the loop to show me where it was – it was quite close to where I was as it turned out, but in a different direction I hadn’t tried. It was a bit of a maze. The camp host for that area was there to show me the site, so thankfully I finally parked in the pull-through spot for my van. I was relieved to finally be there! It was all fairly open, as was sometimes the case with places that had pull-through sites. As usual, I set off to find the facilities. I found that the toilet block nearest to my camping area was out of order, so had to use the one about 5 minutes walk away. I attached my very handy little magnetic camping light onto the side of the van to help me find it in the dark when I came back.
The facilities I ended up using seemed to be the main ones, and were pretty good. Some reviewers had mentioned hearing sirens, and there were highways running along two sides of the park, but I had picked a site that looked to be further away from the roads, and I don’t remember hearing much noise. I made dinner and settled down for the night, it had been a big day.
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