Rocky Mountain National Park & the North

People have been crossing these mountains for at least eleven thousand years, and Clovis and Folsom points have turned up near the high trail that Trail Ridge Road now follows; at the Lindenmeier site north of Fort Collins, Folsom hunters camped among the bones of bison long extinct. The Nuuchiu hunted the high parks west of the Divide, and the Arapaho, who moved south onto these plains in the early 1800s, wintered in the foothill valleys and crossed the range on trails they named for what it took to climb them.

In July 1914 the Colorado Mountain Club, lobbying Congress for a national park, brought two Northern Arapaho elders, Sherman Sage and Gun Griswold, down from the Wind River Reservation with an interpreter, Tom Crispin, for a two-week pack trip through country they had known before their people were removed. Oliver Toll wrote down about thirty names they gave for peaks, lakes and trails. Rocky Mountain National Park was established on January 26, 1915, and Trail Ridge Road, finished across the park in the 1930s along the route the Arapaho called the Child's Trail, climbs to 12,183 feet, the highest continuous paved highway in the country.

Out on the plains, Nathan Meeker, agricultural editor of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, founded the Union Colony in 1870 as a temperance settlement watered by irrigation ditches from the Cache la Poudre, and named its town Greeley. Nine years later, as agent at the White River Agency, he ordered the Utes' racetrack plowed.

What to See in Rocky Mountain National Park & the North

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Pawnee Buttes

Keota

Two remnants of a vanished plain on a grassland the government bought back from Dust Bowl homesteaders in the 1930s.

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Natural Areas

Poudre Canyon

Fort Collins

Colorado's only wild and scenic river, named for buried gunpowder in a story nobody can date, and burned along its length in 2020.

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Historic Sites

Holzwarth Historic Site

Grand Lake

A Denver saloon keeper put out of business by prohibition, a homestead in the Kawuneeche Valley, and a dude ranch that ran from 1919 to 1973.

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Old Fall River Road

Estes Park

Convicts started it in 1913, a contractor finished it in 1920, and since 1968 it has run one way, uphill, at fifteen miles an hour.

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Stanley Hotel

Estes Park

Built by a steam-car maker who came west to die of tuberculosis and lived thirty-seven more years, then rescued by one night in Room 217.

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Scenic Drives through Rocky Mountain National Park & the North

Stories from Rocky Mountain National Park & the North

Rocky Mountain National Park & the North rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.