Rocky Mountain Roadtrip

This is Rocky Mountain National Park, where I took my roadtrip a few weeks ago. The upside to taking a roadtrip to a place like this can be seen by looking at the picture: Awe-inspiring beauty. The downside to taking a roadtrip to a place like this is that in between here and there lay west Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, or hundreds of miles where the phrase "awe-inspiring beauty" rarely applies.
So I left on a Friday, which was marathon driving day. I stopped only twice: Once for lunch and gas at Little Rock, and again for dinner and gas somewhere in far west Oklahoma. Once past Oklahoma City you're into the Great Plains, which in its own way is kind of beautiful. One of my best friends grew up in far western Texas, and when he came to visit Nashville he couldn't get over how many trees there were here. I kind of have the opposite reaction out west - so much open space; a limitless horizon. I made it as far as Amarillo, Texas, where the high plains meets the desert, to spend the night.
On Saturday I drove a few more hours northwest across the high desert of New Mexico and into Colorado, arriving in Denver around lunchtime. When I was looking for jobs at the end of graduate school, Denver was my number one choice; Nashville, number two. However, the job market was much better in Music City so I came here. Part of me still wonders what life would be like if choice #1 had come through. Most of me is happy it turned out the way it did.
Sunday morning was spent at Boulder Valley Church of Christ. They had a wonderful outdoor service that morning, on the lawn facing across the valley to the Front Range. I then spent a couple of hours walking around downtown Boulder before heading up into the mountains.
Up the canyon from Boulder, barely ten miles out of town, you get to Boulder Falls (picture on the left), which is just off of the highway. After a short break here I wound my way over the Front Range and ended up at the south entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park at a little village called Grand Lake.

Right outside of Grand Lake I spent Sunday night in a resort which has several "rustic" cabins spread throughout the woods. Rustic means no television or telephone. They do have electricity and running water. Those are my limits of rusticity. Also throughout the woods were signs warning of attacks by mountain lions and bears. To my disappointment, I saw neither. My wildlife sightings would be limited to elk and mountain goats. The picture below is a view of the village of Grand Lake from the cabin property. Not much to do here at night except sit out on the front porch and read, which I did until it got too cold outside.

The next couple of days were spent exploring inside the park. There is one main highway across the park called the Trail Ridge Road. There is also an old dirt road, originally built back in the 1920s, that winds it way up to meet with the main highway near Fall River Pass, which sits at an elevation of about 11,800 feet. I never hiked too far off of the roads. For one, I'm not big on backcountry hiking alone, and second my sea-level lungs do not at all enjoy hiking at 10,000 feet elevations. Anyway, what follows are some pictures that I took along the way.

This is at the western edge of the park, looking west just after sunset. Though it probably doesn't show up here, I really liked the way the lighting turned out. By the way, I took the picture standing on a bridge over the Colorado River, a few miles from its headwaters. Here the river is about as wide as Otter Creek just below Radnor Lake.

To the right is the Trail Ridge Road near its highest elevation of 12,183 feet. The road spends a lot of time above treeline, and on the northern exposures there was still some snow. I also saw, as mentioned earlier, elk and mountain goats, but unfortunately no bears or lions or other dangerous creatures.

On the left is the climb up the Old Fall River Road. Nine miles long, it is unpaved and consists mostly of the switchbacks you see here. Beautiful scenery, however.

There on the right is Alberta Falls, the largest waterfall I saw on my journey. It is formed by water from a melting glacier higher up the mountain. This was part of my longest hike on the trip. At the end of it I think I knew what it feels like to have emphysema.

Finally, the first of the Colorado pictures were on a roll that had sat in my camera forever, and turned out to have a few forgotten Italy pictures. Happy times. So this last picture is nowhere near Colorado but is of Como, in the Alps in the northern part of the country.

P.S. Did not realize until this second that you could click on the pictures and get a larger version. Go Blogger!