Trip 22: Rocky Mountain and Great Basin National Parks

For this trip, we flew into Denver, Colorado, to get to Rocky Mountain National Park, less than a 2-hour drive away. We stayed just outside the park in Estes Park, a really quaint town with lots of options for lodging and dining (and a couple of brew pubs!). After a day at Rocky Mountain NP, we flew out of Denver to Salt Lake City and drove 3.5 hours across the salt flats to Ely, Nevada, about an hour away from Great Basin National Park. Ely is the closest city to the park with multiple options for lodging and food. From Ely, we drove to Las Vegas (about 4 hours) to fly home.

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Rocky Mountain National Park is popular to visit and requires a timed-entry reservation to enter any part of the park between 9 am and 2 pm (MT). The general reservation does not provide access to Bear Lake Road, which requires a different timed reservation between 5 am and 6 pm (MT). (The Bear Lake Road reservation also allows access to the rest of the park.)

One of the highlights of this park is driving Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous paved road in the United States, from one side of the park to the other. The road climbs over 4,000 feet in elevation, providing views of meadows, forests, rugged mountains, and alpine tundra. Near the summit of the road is the Alpine Visitor Center, which is the highest elevation visitor center in the national park system. The road is usually open starting the last week of May and stays open until mid-October. Our trip was in early June and we felt fortunate to have clear roads, as there were major snowfalls in the area the week before our trip and the week after. It was very windy and cold even in early June, particularly above the treeline. The road crosses the continental divide and there is a marker where water on one side will end up in the Pacific Ocean while water on the other side will eventually end up in the Atlantic Ocean. Driving the road was a great way to see wildlife. We were able to spot moose, elk and deer during our drive.

In the Bear Lake area of the park, we hiked Bear Lake Loop and the Sprague Lake Loop Trail. Both were beautiful hikes around mountain lakes.

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Great Basin typically ranks among the least visited national parks in the United States, mainly due to its remoteness. Ironically, we felt the park offered many of the same features as Rocky Mountain National Park, which is one of the most visited parks! Great Basin is considered an "island," in that the mountain sits in the middle of the desert, but provides a very different environment with its varied forests, abundant wildlife, lakes and streams. There is a 4,000-foot elevation change along Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive, which climbs from the desert, through woodlands, meadows, groves of aspens, and forests of pines. The park also includes Lehman Caves, which normally can be toured, but were unfortunately closed due to an infrastructure project when we visited. The park also includes groves of bristlecone pines, which are the oldest trees in the world, living up to 5,000 years.

Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive provides beautiful views of the park and the area surrounding it. The road is 12 miles long, with plenty of overlook areas to stop at. The drive ends at the Wheeler Peak parking area, where there are several trailheads. We enjoyed the Alpine Lakes Loop trail, which took us through forests and meadows, across moraine fields, and around two alpine lakes.

As for brew pubs, we stopped at Two22 Brew in the Denver area; checked out Rock Cut Brewing Company, Estes Park Brewery, and Lumpy Ridge Brewing Co. in Estes Park; Pumphouse Brewing in Longmont, CO; and Chicago Brewing in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, there were no brew pubs near Great Basin National Park or Ely, NV, where we stayed.