Thursday, August 11, 2011

8/11/11 Rocky Mountain National Park

Today: Rocky Mountain National Park! It just takes a smidge under two hours to get here from Aurora. This is The Stanley, a famous hotel in Estes Park, right before you get to RMNP. The Shining was filmed here, but there's a lot more history than that in this old classic.


It was a pretty popular day in RMNP. We went in the Beavers Meadow Entrance. The traffic wasn't too bad, but the parking was, so we took a shuttle and very soon thereafter, we were at Bear Lake. It's a pretty simple half-mile hike around the lake, but it packs a lot of scenery in a short time.

Bear Lake in front, Longs Peak (the mountain on the Colorado state quarter) in the back along with Keyboard of the Winds (the jaggedy part) and then Pagoda Peak. I don't know the names of the other 3 points, but they're all beautiful to look at.

Good parking karma--we got the #1 spot in a fairly full lot, very close to where the shuttle pick-up is located. (Here we are returning to our car.)

At the Horseshoe Park overlook:

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