One of the first days we were in Estes we decided to go and explore Rocky Mountain National park. This ended up being a really good thing because just as we got to the park we read signs saying that it would be closing at 5pm that very night for the winter! At least the Trail Ridge Road part that takes you over the mountains (which is the number one rated attraction!) At first we thought we’d do some hiking, (and actually drove all the way down to Bear Lake to go hiking) but after re-evaluating things, we decided to make a mad dash up to Trail Ridge Road to see if we could catch it before it closed! And lucky for us, we made it there and back before the road closed! Yay!
Here we are at Bear Lake where we had a nice lunch of chicken salad sandwiches before heading up to see Trail Ridge Road.
We had to take a potty stop on the way up and so some of the kids and I wandered around why the “pooper” in the family (Harry) took his sweet time. đ ha ha!
Here we are at “Many Parks Curve” where you could stop and take pictures of the parks grand mountains!
Then we proceeded to Trail Ridge Road (which we just drove through as fast as we could) so that we could get back down the mountain before 5 pm. It was a beautiful drive and had some very diverse and different scenery. Like tundra! All the pictures below were taken out our passenger side window!
So weird to be on top of a mountain and not have any trees! You’d think we were driving in the middle of Kansas! But we loved seeing the Tundra!
It is hard to see in this picture, but the roads were literally within FEET of the edge of cliffs. You had to be so very careful while you were driving since most of the roads didn’t have walls or barricades to keep cars from falling over. We could totally understand why the park would close this road once it snowed. It would just be too dangerous! I’ll tell you what though, driving this road sure did give me the heeby geebies! đ
We ended up making it back down the mountain the way we had come with plenty of time because there was actually a road block once you got down the mountain on the west side due to construction. We could have waited the road block out, but there wasn’t nearly as much to see on the west side of the park anyway, so we just figured we’d head back and see more on the East side. Plus we could see the storm rolling in!
Once we got back to the East side of the park we made a quick stop at Sprague Lake.
Then we headed over to do a hike to Alberta Falls! It was an absolutely gorgeous hike, but it started sprinkling on us, and then both Adam and my camera batteries DIED so we didn’t get ANY pictures of the actual falls. Thanks to google images I can at least give you an idea of how beautiful it was.
Here are a few family pictures before both camera’s died. đ
And here is what the falls looked like (minus the vibrant fall leaves).
We sure did enjoy our day exploring the Rocky Mountains and making new memories as a family.