With July 4th falling on a Friday this year, that meant another long weekend that needed some travel plans! After toying around with many national park options for the weekend, we decided on Rocky Mountain National Park. Besides its obvious beauty, the location of being only 8 hours from Lincoln was a large attraction (we’re in summer school now so a bit more tired when combining that with working full time!) as well as the weather factor- July in Northern Colorado is absolutely spectacular! And we couldn’t have been happier with our choice.
Although there are a few campsites available in the actual park, they were all completely booked. I decided to expand my search to camping in Estes Park, the lovely town right outside the Eastern are of the park where we were interested in hiking. There were quite a few camping options here, though many were also full. We chose Hermit Park Campground which was about 2 miles south of Estes Park ($20/night). It was perfect! A bit farther from RMNP (it took us a little over 30 minutes to make it to the trailhead from our campsite) but it was camping in an actual park, not an RV park site. Our campsite itself was beautiful and the toilets were the cleanest I’ve ever seen when camping. We didn’t get to do any actual hiking and exploring in Hermit Park, but even just staying in our little spot was awesome.
We left Thursday after work and it took us about 8 hours to drive the whole thing to Hermit Park. We didn’t arrive ’til close to 1:00am, so we took it slow on Friday the 4th. I knew I wanted to do some lake hiking that day since that wouldn’t be as difficult as climbing an actual mountain and would give us some time to adjust to the altitude. We entered RMNP through the Beaver Crossing entrance ($20 fee good for 1 week) and headed for the Bear Lake Trailhead. Because we got there later in the morning and it was a holiday weekend, we drove to the Park and Ride spot in the park and hopped on a shuttle that took us to the trailhead. The shuttles were great, arriving every 5 minutes to pick people up, and we had no trouble catching one for the way back either- not to mention they’re free!
The rangers at the Bear Lake Trailhead were very nice and helpful. We got a map for our route and started out on the 3.6 mile round trip hike. We hit the first lake very quickly, but Nymph Lake was nothing to be excited about. We barely even stopped and just kept hiking past on up to the next one- Dream Lake.
Dream Lake was much prettier. Sadly, the day was cloudy so the colors aren’t quite as vibrant as we were hoping for. The trail was also very crowded with families out for the holiday. Although the entire trail only has about a 600 ft. elevation gain, the trailhead starts above 9,000 ft. The fact that I’m out of shape combined with where I live (Nebraska) made it for a little bit of tough going- it was hard to catch my breath at the altitude! The hike was still fun though and a good starter for our next day.
Last lake on this route was Emerald Lake. It honestly looked pretty similar to Dream Lake, and I thought Dream Lake was better. The rangers had told us that thunderstorms were in the forecast as they are most afternoons in the park. Just as we were leaving the lake to hike back down (around 1:30pm) rain started. It was actually really fun since the rain was not coming down hard at all and the thunder was very loud!
One highlight on the trek back down was seeing an elk! It was right on the side of the trail and didn’t seem too disturbed by the hikers passing by. When we reached the bottom it was no longer raining and the ranger told us the nearest lightning strike was 41 miles away. We decided to head out on another hike, this time to Bierstadt Lake. The shuttle driver had given the most valuable tip all day- if you want to hike Bierstadt, DON’T get off at the Bierstadt Lake stop. Instead take the shuttle to Bear Lake and then hike over to Bierstadt. It was 2 miles from Bear Lake to Bierstadt, but it was only 200 ft elevation gain. Hiking from Bierstadt Lake trailhead was literally switchbacks all the way up to the lake- would have been SO exhausting.
We took the hike around Bierstadt Lake and stopped at the “beach” viewpoint. The beach was actually just a marsh :-). At this point our camera was dead so we hiked down through the switchbacks to catch the shuttle back to our car. We headed to the nearest Starbucks in Estes where we charged the camera battery and checked out new GoPro footage from the day. It was going to be an early morning the next day as we planned to do a sunrise hike and then hit Flattop Mountain. Read about those soon!
Fire Round the World 