Rocky Mountain National Park

Rocky Mountain National Park was created in 1915.  In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps built one of the Park’s highlights, Trail Ridge Road; crossing the continental divide at Milner Pass, it is the highest paved through road in Colorado. In 2019, RMNP was the 3rd most visited National Park in the country with over 4.7 million visitors. Long’s Peak—the highest point in the Park at 14,259’—looks over 425 square miles of wilderness, campgrounds, alpine lakes, hiking trails, and more, including five visitor centers. 

In 2021, Rocky Mountain was the first Park visited on the Park-to-Park Tour. Our four day itinerary in the Park included hiking in the Bear Lake Area, a driving tour of Old Fall River Road, participation in the Junior Ranger program, a summit hike at Deer Mountain, and much more. 

Read our blog post on Rocky Mountain

Itinerary

We are presenting our itinerary as we lived it. Not the plan, but rather what we were actually able to accomplish. Naturally there are some missed goals and some serendipitous surprises. We always rolled with the punches and made the best out of our time in the national parks. Below we have included some notes that explain how the itinerary changed from what we had in mind. 

It’s important to know that these plans were made to suit the abilities and interests of two young girls aged 9 and 11. We feel confident that any family on their “Every Kid Outdoors Summer” (4th grade) could handle this itinerary. For hikes, we have listed the distance, elevation gain, and time that we tracked, which may differ from published (or actual) measurements. 

Day 1 

Morning    

• Breakfast
  

• Enter at Fall River Entrance (timed entry)
  

• Sheep Lakes
  

• Alluvial Fan
  

• Drive Old Fall River Road
  

• Alpine Visitor Center
  

• Hike Alpine Ridge Trail (<1 mile RT)
  

Afternoon 

• Lunch at Fairview Curve
  

• Grand Lake, CO for ice cream
  

• Kawuneeche Visitor Center
  

• Holzworth Historical Site
  

• Milner Pass
  

• Forest Canyon Overlook (Continental Divide)
  

• Medicine Bow Curve
  

• Rock Cut
  

Evening              

• Dinner at camp
  

• Overnight at Moraine Park
  
  

Day 2

Morning

• Breakfast at camp
  

• Bear Lake Shuttle to Bear Lake
  

• Hike: Bear Lake + Nymph, Dream, & Emerald Lakes (4.5m RT, 725 feet, 4 hours)
  

• Shuttle back to camp
  

Afternoon 

• Lunch in van
  

• Beaver Meadows Visitor Center
  

• Sheep Lakes
  

Evening

• Dinner at camp
  

• Overnight at Moraine Park
  
  

Day 3 

Morning

• Breakfast at camp
  

• Drive up Trail Ridge Road
  

• Many Parks Curve Overlook
  

• Hidden Valley / Junior Ranger HQ
  

• Rainbow Curve Overlook
  

Afternoon

• Lunch at Rock Cut
  

• Return down Trail Ridge Road
  

• Upper Beaver Meadows
  

 Evening        

• Dinner at Fern Lake Trailhead
  

• Hike: Fern Lake to The Pool (3.8 miles RT, 285 feet, 2 hours)
  

• Overnight at Moraine Park

Day 4

• Depart camp
  

• Fort Collins for Groceries & Resupply
  

• Drive to Grand Teton National Park
  

Notes

For the first two days, we did a decent job of following our original, planned itinerary, though we never completed the full day. One crucial aspect to the planning was the timed-entry passes that allowed us both into the park and into the Bear Lake corridor. We talk about these in more detail in the blog post on Rocky Mountain. Day three, we completely re-organized. 

One day one, we got a bit of a slower start than was our goal, but that become typical through the trip. We made it to the Alpine Visitor Center more or less on time, but ended up spending more time there than we thought. We hadn’t planned on the short, high-elevation hike up the Aline Ridge Trail, which was a must do. We also got engaged by a Junior Ranger program inside the visitor center. So, lunch was late. 

We also decided to drive all the way out of the park to Grand Lake, CO for ice cream overlooking the lake — a totally worthwhile diversion. As a result, when we made it back to the top, we ran into thunderstorms at Rock Cut. We knew that afternoon thunderstorms were common in the park, especially at higher elevation, and this came to fruition more than once. Lightning is nothing to mess with at 13,000 feet. So, we didn’t get a chance stop at the popular sites along Trail Ridge Road on the way down, as planned. 

On day two, the shuttle to Bear Lake took longer than expected, and we hiked farther than planned. (We added a loop around Bear Lake at the beginning of the Emerald Lake trail.) So, the afternoon ended up being a little lazier than planned, and we forewent a hike at Upper Beaver Meadows. 

Day three found the girls not keen on a six-mile hike to the summit of Deer Mountain, as originally scheduled. So, on the advice of a Ranger, we chose to drive on Trail Ridge Road again, this time going up and hitting the spots we missed for thunderstorms. This was the right call, especially when we stumbled onto a program about wild land firefighting at the Junior Ranger Headquarters at Hidden Valley. We made it back to Rock Cut for lunch, only to get chased out again by storms. So, we never got to hike Tundra Communities, but we did see lots of pikas and marmots. 

We also stopped back into Upper Beaver Meadows covering an itinerary item we’d left off of the previous day. Finally, we added an entirely new hike, at the spur of the moment. After an early dinner (with lots of light left), we hiked to The Pool via the Fern Lake Trail. This hadn’t been in our plan, because the trail was only recently re-opened because of fire damage. As always, we found that some of the serendipitous, off-itinerary activities were the best of most memorable.