As this busy summer keeps rolling on I've had to skip a few more weeks of this series, but hope to make up for it a little now by adding three posts this weekend from a recent trip to Colorado. Part 1 here will cover my morning in the popular Bear Lake area of Rocky Mountain National Park, and then we'll cross the divide and move west for Parts 2 and 3 tomorrow...
After wrapping up the Pearl Street Arts Festival in Boulder, I took advantage of the opportunity to hang out in the area for a couple days before needing to head back to work. I had a specific hike planned for Tuesday (July 19) but Monday was left intentionally open. I wanted to spend some time in Rocky, if possible, but hadn't reserved one of the advanced entrance permits. I knew that more permits would be released at 5:00 Sunday evening (for Monday morning entry) so my first hope was to snag one of those. If that didn't work, I'd either have to pass through the park before or after peak hours- or skip it entirely this time around.
Fortunately I was able to get online and grab a permit for the Bear Lake corridor and a 5 am entry- so after packing up following my show I drove to Ft. Collins and got a cheap room for the night. It was almost ten by the time I got there, and though initially I thought about leaving right away at two the next morning (which would be necessary to drive to the park and hike in to any of the potential sunrise spots I had in mind) I decided to go easy and "sleep in" a bit, leaving instead at 3:30 with the plan to find a nice spot to catch alpenglow on the surrounding peaks from Moraine Park. This kind of set the tone for a low-key day, allowing myself to relax a bit and acclimate, knowing I had more ambitious plans for the day after. The following images were all from that morning, starting with those sunrise scenes from Moraine Park and followed by an enjoyable hike to some of the well known and easily accessible (but beautiful!) features in the Bear Lake area.
Parts 2 and 3 will be covered in posts to come and I'll have a more detailed account of the trip in the next edition of my newsletter, which will be released in the coming days as well. I'll update this post with a direct link to that when it goes live, but you can SUBSCRIBE HERE if you'd like to sign up and have it delivered to your inbox.
With that, and without further ado, scenes from a morning in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado-
