Rocky Mountain Park

Having planned two days in Boulder, I decided to take a little extra time getting up. My only real plan today was to head up to Rocky Mountain National Park and drive the Ridge River Road. An 11-mile dirt road that winds its way up through the mountains and is only open in the summer months.

Other than that, I planned to take it easy. I had found a coffee shop on Pearl Street the night before, and scoped it out to prevent another Scooters incident. Ozo is a chain...but a much smaller and Colorado-specific one. So it passed all the right tests. I started the day with a cup of coffee and a scone looking at this view while mapping out the trip through Estes Park that would take me into the Rockies.

It was about an hour drive to the park so I kept listening to my audio book while watching mountain after mountain slip by the windows. Colorado easily has some of the best landscapes I've seen this entire trip, but I don't think that's much of a surprise.

When I finally made it to the park there was a HUGE line of cars to enter. I knew I wasn't early...but was I really late enough for this? Not having much of a choice, I slowly eeked forward over the next half hour until finally I was at the front. Nothing could stop me getting to Ridge River Road now! Well, except for a new program the Rocky Mountain National Park (and only the Rocky Mountain National Park) had put in place that required advance reservations for park access between the hours of 6am and 5pm. It was noon.

Well I certainly wasn't going to go home empty handed, so I decided to try and find things to do in the nearby town of Estes Park but...you can only eat lunch and drink a beer so many times before you realize you can't do that really more than once if you want to drive up an unpaved mountain road...but as it turns out, there was a particularly famous hotel sitting over the town on a nearby hill that most certainly warranted a visit.

The Stanley Hotel is where Steven King wrote the Shining, and where the TV miniseries was filmed after the hit movie. It has all the makings of the Overlook hotel from the novel, complete with a mini hedge maze out front. Unfortunately they were out of tour tickets for the day but I was able to wander around some of the halls, listen to guests try to get ghost stories out of staff, and pretend to be staying there while drinking a coffee and reading a book on the porch. The hours just slipped past until finally it was time to go back to the park!!

Filled with new energy and purpose I raced back to the park entrance as the clock struck five and was able to enter without incident. The Ridge River Road wasn't far in and in short order I was putting the Mazda through its toughest test of this ride. The views certainly made the ride worth it. I found myself tuning down the music or just turning it off so I could roll my windows down and slowly drive up through the mountains, stopping at various overlooks to witness just how magnificent the park was.

The road joins the main Trail Ridge Road at the Alpine Center where I stopped for a few more photos before beginning my descent. Which is ALSO where I caught this awesome photo of a deer!

It was late-ish by the time I got back to Boulder, so I grabbed some food from the hotel restaurant and went for one last wander before bed.