It is good to be finally at our destination, Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP). We left NY on June 1 and drove through the midsection of the country; many days were in the nineties. The temps here are 60’s and 70’s, dropping into the 30’s at night. It feels refreshing. The trip was fairly uneventful, a good thing. We visited with friends and family on the way and met up with friends from back home, Larry and Susan in McCook, Ne. We had to travel a little north and they had to travel a little south to make the connection. They had been on a 3 week trip, visiting family in Texas, their two kids in Ft Collins, Co and seeing many parks in Colorado and Utah. They were heading east to get back home and their jobs and we were heading west to start our volunteer assignment at RMNP for the summer.
We arrived in Colorado on June 5 to a strange mix of flood warnings and high fire danger. The snow pack in the Rockies is tremendous, over 250% of normal in some places. With warmer temperatures, the snow is quickly melting and filling rivers and streams. At this point, the National Weather Service is calling the flooding only minor, but we have been told by a ranger in RMNP that the Colorado River is higher than it’s ever been in the park. The bridge going into Holzwarth Historic Site (HHS) where we plan to stay is closed and temporary housing has been arranged for us and the other couple, Lee and Sally, who were scheduled to stay at HHS. They arrived a week earlier and said that the area in the campground where our temporary housing is still had lots of snow when they got here. It’s all gone now. We were able to walk into HHS, the bridge is open to foot traffic. We noticed that lots of Lodgepole Pine trees had been cut along the road approaching the site due to the pine beetle infestation. But HHS still has magnificent trees standing as the park sprays them annually to keep the trees safe from the beetle. We just hope the bridge holds and the waters start to recede, but it looks like it will take a long time for the snow to melt in the mountains.
We had been staying on the east side of the park in Denver and Boulder. There it is normally drier than the west side of the Front Range, and the fire danger there has become high. Smoke that could be seen in the air was actually from the huge Arizona fire. We went to hear a talk by a Boulder County Fire Management Officer at REI and learned about issues facing the area and the residents. A lot was said about the Four Mile Canyon Fire that happened here last year right at the end of our assignment at RMNP. We almost cancelled a trip to Boulder then because of it, the city had been put on standby to evacuate, but fortunately we got here ok and no evacuation of the city was needed. The fire left a lasting effect on the community however, and we talked with a few people who had residences in the burn area. Their homes and some others were spared but many homes were lost, fortunately no human lives were lost. We toured the area of the fire with our friend Judy who lives in Boulder. She took us up to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, a short climb, where we had great views of the burn area. It was a massive area, about ten square miles and 169 homes had burned. Some residents have started rebuilding, and the interesting thing is that since the surrounding forest has burned the fire danger is basically non existent there now.
After Boulder, we spent a few days camping on the east side of RMNP, acclimating to the higher altitude. The weather was nice except the first night when a thunderstorm hit us. We were in our tents but it was in an open spot and we were not really safe, fortunately we didn’t get hit. The number of dead trees from the pine beetle epidemic was noticeably higher than what we saw last year when we visited the east side, and it will get worse. The west side has had the epidemic for ten years and most of the lodgepole pine trees there are dead. We did some light hiking for two days, sometimes in snow but we stayed lower to avoid the deeper snow pack. This past Friday we drove over Trail Ridge Road to the west side, the road had only been opened Monday of this past week. Before that we climbed Deer Mountain, and even though it is about 10,000 feet it was free of snow on top and offered great views of the mountain ranges within the park. We spent an hour up there, and it was a popular spot. We talked with other people, including two younger women and their toddlers that they hauled up on their backs. They helped us identify the peaks in the Mummy Range and then we found that one of them, Lisa, had written the guide book “Rocky Mountain National Park, the Complete Hiking Guide”. We’re going to check it out because the hiking guide we have has some deficiencies and Lisa said that is why she wrote her guide. It was the description of hiking Mt. Meeker that particularly annoyed her and spurred her to write her guide. She was gracious to the writers of the other guide though, acknowledging that it was the first effort to write a guide to hiking in RMNP and because of that deserved credit. She did 15 years of research, exploring and hiking, and two years of writing and editing of her book. She said though that it wasn’t worth the tremendous effort it took. I thanked her anyway for writing the guide, fully expecting it to be an improvement.
The top of Trail Ridge Road had very high banks of snow in some spots. We heard that they had to plow through 17 feet of snow, and we estimated it was only a few feet less than that when we saw it. The pack is melting with the 50 and 60 degree temps they are getting up there now. On the west side of the park, the Neversummer Range looks to have even more snow. The hiking is limited here right now if you don’t have snow shoes, and we didn’t bring ours, not expecting to need them. Andrew, a backcountry ranger who was here last year for his first stint, told us he had been out in his snow shoes checking out the trails and said it was hard work. He even post holed while breaking trail with his snow shoes, that means the snow is getting rotten and not holding up. They presently have only four backcountry camp sites open out of more than fifty so there is not a lot of backcountry camping right now. On our first hike here this summer we went up the Colorado River Trail to Lulu City, using snow shoes for much of the way. But we didn’t have to break trail as it was basically hard packed from foot traffic.
We are thrilled to see old friends from last year and to meet new ones as well. Our neighbors Lee and Sally are from Texas and we found out that we have mutual friends in the NPS. Jim and Jan worked with us at Bryce and they worked with Lee and Sally at Chaco Canyon. Lee and Sally also worked at Capitol Reef in Utah and I remember when they came to visit Jim and Jan at Bryce. Small world in the NPS. We have already been recipients of Lee and Sally’s generosity, borrowing laundry detergent and receiving some Texas style tortilla soup, yummy.
We just started our assignment with a week of training. We will get a review of safety, the 10 essentials and park interpretation to name a few. We will also get updates on the trails, resource protection, wildlife, water issues and fire ecology to name a few. Today we learned that RMNP has the fifth highest numbers of search and rescues (SARs) in the national park system. The mountains and weather here make for challenging conditions and keep the park staff busy. With the huge amount of snow, several projects are running behind schedule, including the clearing of trees and trails and the opening of some areas. It was jokingly said that we have two seasons here, winter and July. The chief ranger had been sent temporarily to Glacier N.P. as the chief ranger there had to take a leave of absence and Glacier has had 400% of the snow fall they usually get, so they have even bigger issues up there. I don’t want to give the wrong impression though, the weather so far has been great as far as I’m concerned. This is a place where you can be very active, even right now, whether it’s hiking (snow shoeing), biking, horseback riding or paddling to name a few. One more thing that I got a kick out was hearing about how we (employees and volunteers) are here to serve the public and the protect the park, but sometimes a visitor “fails the attitude test”. We can be polite to a visitor but they all may not be polite in return. Smile and sigh gently under your breath.
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