Oh, we woke up to a glorious morning! It was blue skies without a cloud in them and we had timed passes to get into Rocky Mountain National Park for a beautiful morning of hiking. We ate some breakfast and coffee in our Airbnb, packed our bags and headed off to the park. We waited about 15 minutes in line at the entry station, stopped to take a requisite photo with the National Park sign, and then, we were off!
In order to cut down on the traffic at the park, not only do people have timed entrances passes (ours was from 7 to 9 am), but most of the hiking is reached via shuttle buses. We understood how this worked, drove to the area we wanted to be in, and hopped on a shuttle bus, which mandated everyone wear a face mask. We were dropped off at Bear Lake. This is the trailhead for the most popular hikes in the park. We were going on THE most popular hike.
This day we were headed up to beautiful Emerald Lake. This would be around a 5 mile round trip hike with elevation gain of about 1000 feet. On the way to Emerald Lake there were two other lakes: Nymph Lake and Dream Lake.
We joined a full range of hikers on this beautiful three hour hike into the mountains. There were many many families with small children including some that were infants and toddlers being carried in backpacks. There were also people who were our age and considerably older and then many other people in between. Some people were in great shape and had very excellent quality gear. Others had tennis shoes or sandals on and some didn’t even appear to have any bottles of water along. Everyone was off to enjoy the mountains, the lakes, the views, and the beautiful, beautiful day. For a while we hiked with great views of Long’s Peak, the highest mountain in the park.
At nearly every turn there was another fabulous view of the iconic mountains in this park. We also had a chance to see quite a few other small animals: marmots, golden mantle ground squirrels and chipmunks.
A highlight was when we reached Emerald Lake. it was a beautiful greenish colored lake with the mountains spectacularly rising right from the water. We managed to scramble over some rocks and get a front row seat where we had about as lovely of a lunchtime as one could imagine. It’s amazing how good peanut butter and jelly and Kind bars taste when you’re sitting in paradise.
The walk down was easier than the hike up. But, by the time we reach the bottom there were a lot more people walking both ways and we were tired. We ended our hiking portion of the day by strolling around Bear Lake, having many beautiful views in a 1 mile walk. Then, our legs had had it. Time to hop on the bus and start back to our Airbnb.
We took the luxury of a middle of the afternoon nap. When we got up went to the local laundromat and did a week's worth of laundry. Clean clothes do not happen by magic on a many week trip. Now we have clean clothes for the next part of the journey. Dinner was easy: baked potatoes from our stash that we had brought along. And then some nice time settling in looking at pictures getting some blog posts. It was really a lovely, lovely, lovely day.
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