Trail Ridge Road winds across forty-eight miles, up four thousand feet in elevation, and through forests of aspens and ponderosa pines to a pinnacle of 12,183 feet in the alpine tundra. Trail Ridge Road, from one side to the other, will give you mental whiplash from all of its change. Well, if you’re stupid, not just mental. Slow down on the curves. They’re called switchbacks for a reason. And no, just because the fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit sign is in yellow may technically mean it’s a suggestion, the alternative is hitting a stone wall or driving off a cliff. I never understand the people who speed over the pass. I just can’t help but think, where are they trying to go that could be better than here?
It dumps out into two mountain towns on either side of Rocky Mountain National Park, Grand Lake on the west, Estes Park on the east.
Grand Lake is a tiny mountain town that has yet to be “discovered” by tourists, except for on the Fourth of July, when tens of thousands of people crowd onto its boardwalks to watch the fireworks light from a barge in the middle of the lake. You can walk the entire main drag of the town in ten minutes if you manage not to stop in at the rubber ducky store that also sells hot sauce. Or in Grand Lake Chocolates, where people line up around the block on the Fourth for their caramel apples, dark chocolate turtle clusters, and ice cream. Oh, man, are those seven-dollar double-scoop waffle cones worth the money. Every flavor written out colorfully on the whiteboard fills me with indecision every Fourth when we make our annual family pilgrimage, but I know I’m kidding myself. Peppermint Candy-Cane always wins.
Estes Park, on the other hand, has too many t-shirt shops to count and is one of the many places where Taylor Swift owns property. The endless Mexican food restaurants almost make up for it—granted, a lot of them are a little bougie and serve things like buffalo enchiladas, but still. Actually, if you were to look up Estes Park on urbandictionary.com, you would probably find the definition for bougie—“aspiring to be a higher class than one is.” The demographic is an odd mix between people who are frustratingly close to Aspen-level money, sunburnt tourists (because yes, the higher elevation means greater sun exposure), and weed-smoking ski bums.
I like Grand Lake better.
I’m biased. I know I am. My family owns a cabin about five miles outside of town, a little place on the near-edge of a steep hill that leads right down to the Colorado River. My great-grandfather decided in 1960 that he would build a round cabin there, and he did. You have to go through either of the two bedrooms, where the walls are covered in red and black shag carpeting for insulation, to get to the bathroom—but it’s ours. It’s where my memories live.
Memories of scrambling down the hill that’s so steep you can’t help but run to the bottom. Memories of spending entire days carving out elaborate snow lounges, complete with packed-down benches and drink holders. Memories of sitting around outside at 9:11am on the Fourth of July to watch the fighter jets fly over. Memories of playing in the river when it’s not too high, climbing between the rocks that low snow runoff years expose. Memories of biking around the loop across the road with my sister, slogging up the hill just to fly back down. Memories of walking our Shih Tzu Sadie and my cousin’s bearded collie Abby, both gone now, down to the bridge and back.
The entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, and Trail Ridge Road, is just a few miles from the other side of town. It’s only one of several roads that traverse the park from end to end, but one end of Trail Ridge starts at our park entrance, and for that I am enormously grateful. With my grandmother’s lifetime pass to the Park, a bona fide golden ticket she got back when they were still free, a day on Trail Ridge doesn’t always mean we drive to the top. Sometimes it just means packing the family and the coolers into our minivan and finding a trailhead with picnic tables, borrowing each other’s sun hats as the sun shifts and comes out from behind the clouds. Sometimes it just means driving into the Park at dusk to check out a ranger talk, hoping a moose or an elk with a 7-point rack will come out of hiding. Sometimes it just means stopping at the Visitor Center to ask for hike recommendations even though we know most of the trails, choosing an easier one that will take us less than five miles. Sometimes, with enough begging, it means convincing my mom to add a few extra hours to our drive back to Littleton by going over Trail Ridge to go home.
This is the part where I describe, in detail, what it looks like to go over Trail Ridge Road from end to end. What it feels like. But you’ll have to bear with me. Because I know that my words, any words, will be inadequate. How do I describe the light breeze that wraps you up in the silence, interrupted only by the pine trees whooshing their needles against each other in a quiet cacophony? How do I describe the clear thinness of the air that tastes like evergreens, or the endless open valleys of tall brown grasses and willows? How do I tell you that they are framed by mountains that rise straight up from the valley floor—that there is no gentle incline in between? How do I tell you that the view from 12,183 feet stretches clear to Wyoming, and all that’s in the middle is mountains? Or that if you turn around without moving from where you stand, you see another pair of peaks rising in front of you—a pair that plunges to a common valley so green you just know that it falls below tree line? Or about the tundra flowers so fragile, a set of clueless boots will set them back a hundred years?
Some things must be seen.
To a native Coloradan, the High Country is where we go to feel whole again, to feel connected to everything, because we know we are small. And yet we’re part of it. This is ours, and it’s not, all at once. It is too big to belong to us, but we belong to it.
It is the highest place I have ever been, in soul and body at once.
