Day 20 – Rocky Mountain high – sans guardrails

On Trail Ridge Road, Rocky Mountain National Park

Arches to Estes Park, CO

(Rocky Mountain National Park)

Today was one of our longest driving days – we were in the car for most of the day – and we survived it pretty well.  Fortunately, Lanie had to use the bathroom at an opportune time, since the exit we pulled off on had a nearby grocery store (for lunch provisions) and elementary school (with playground and picnic table).

See what's behind them?  No, that's not some weird kind of rock, it's snow!
Snow, in August!  They don't call it tundra for nothing.

After some driving that probably took years off the van’s life (see Bob’s account below), we arrived at Rocky Mountain National Park around 6pm.  The place we’re staying is in Estes Park, which is on the other side of RMNP, but we thought we’d drive through the park to see a bit of it on our way.  This involved taking the Trail Ridge Road, which is supposedly the highest continuously paved highway in the country.  If you’ve ever driven certain sections of the Pacific Coast Highway, you have an idea what this road is like – a harrowing series of switchbacks with sheer drops off the side and no guardrails.  It’s the kind of road where you feel that if you sneeze at the wrong time, you might easily plunge to your death.  It is also a beautiful road, with breathtaking mountain scenery and an interesting view of the tundra from above treeline.

After surviving this ordeal, we were happy to find a pizza restaurant in Estes Park (Cheesy Lee’s!) and then move on to our destination – the YMCA of the Rockies resort.  This is a very cool place, bordering on Rocky Mountain National Park, with tons of activities and amenities.  Tonight and tomorrow night we’re staying in a hotel room, and the two days after that we have a large 2-bedroom cabin, with a full kitchen.  (These cabins are very popular – despite calling on the morning of the first day that reservations opened several months ago, I wasn’t able to get the cabin for the full four days.)  Since 12 of the last 13 days have involved sleeping on the ground, we are all giddy with anticipation of what we’ll experience – beds with sheets!  Daily showers!  Clean towels!  Electricity and plumbing!  It’s all very exciting.

***

From Bob:

This was not my favorite day of the trip.  I am nervous enough about the car being overloaded and past its prime without us going over multiple switchback roadways to ever higher mountain passes.  (It was even worse from the passenger seat. – Ed.) (Thanks for mentioning that, Ed.  I can concur completely since I was in the passenger seat for more than half the trip – Bob.)  Route 70 itself offers some nice vertical action as it climbs from Grand Junction through Vail. This is just a warm-up, though; the fun really starts when you get on Rt. 40 near Empire and start climbing through the fearsome Berthoud Pass (elev. 11,315 ft.).  Then the road descends for a while through Winter Park.  In Granby It starts climbing again until you enter Rocky Mountain National Park and think you must be near the top. 

Driving off the edge of the world?

                Not long after the visitor’s center we stopped to see a moose (rule #1 for spotting wildlife on National Park roads: pull over where you see lots of people with cameras all looking in the same direction), and a man told us he had passed a herd of elk on the Trail Ridge Road.  What he didn’t mention was that some of the elks’ antlers were actually poking into the upper atmosphere, thus making them the only elks in the country that are under the jurisdiction of both the National Park Service and NASA.

                That Trail Ridge Road CLIMBS, baby. Up over 12,000 feet it goes, and for most of it, there’s nothing at the edge of the road to keep you from taking the very fast way down.  We saw those NASA elk and they were shaking their big antlered heads at us (almost certainly causing several satellites to change their orbits) thinking, probably: “What a bunch of idiots driving around the above-treeline tundra with their white knuckles and squeaking breaks.  This place is really not meant for them, poor two-legged round heads. When will they learn their limits?”

Always a scientist, Zoe attempts to verify the claim of the
Continental Divide by pouring out her water bottle.

                I do not wish to talk about this part of the trip any more, except to say that at one point – at 6:30 pm according to our trip journal – we crossed over the Continental Divide for the last time (at Milner Pass, elev. 10,759) heading east.  This ensures us a gentle, gradual downhill glide all the way back to New England.

                Instead, I will mention a cool thing we did last night back on the flat desert.  Ever since we pitched camp in a mild drizzle, it never looked like raining again there in the Devil’s Garden.  So, we decided to take the rain fly cover off our tent for the last night.  It’s very nice star gazing there, and it was a thrill gazing at the heavens from inside our sleeping bags, inside our tent. 

                It also gave us a slight head start on packing up our belongings for the long, winding, ascending drive to Colorado, since we could fold up the fly and its pole the night before.  Perhaps because of this little edge, we were able to hit the road at 9:09 (according to the trip journal), a full six minutes before our slated departure time.  We had told the girls that getting out on time would be considered their Feat of Strength for the day, qualifying them for a present from the present box.  The later feat of strength – running around the RMNP Alpine Visitor’s Center parking lot to test the effects of high altitude/low oxygen – was strictly optional.

Here is the aforementioned Feat of Strength.  We all managed to run around the parking lot without collapse.