Cabin Journal

Crowding Out the Park

The crowds in Rocky Mountain Park this summer have been at record highs. On a hike this summer in Glacier Gorge, I found the main parking lots already full at 7:45 in the morning, and the bus I took from the Park ‘n’ Ride was standing room only. At the main Bear Lake parking lot the lines to the bathrooms were five people deep.

On days that all the parking lots are full in the popular Bear Lake area, cars are stopped far below at Moraine Park and not allowed any farther. If you can manage to get near a trailhead, the closest place to park might be several “blocks” away down the road. On popular trails (like the one to Alberta Falls, above, or on top of Trail Ridge Road, below) the experience is less like hiking than joining up with a parade.

The town of Estes Park is 10 times worse, as everyone congregates there after their visit to the park for pizza, souvenirs and salt-water taffy. Bumper to bumper traffic and long lines are an every day occurrence.

And yet, my cabin is about 10 miles from the front door of the park, so it’s hard to resist the lure of this place: 415 square miles of undeveloped land, much of it wilderness. It’s a place where elk and deer herds move freely, where bear are not hunted, where you can see moose along the river bottoms, and where rivers run undammed and unchecked. From different spots in Rocky Mountain National Park, you can view distant and uninhabited mountain ranges in every direction.

I’ve been told that park visitorship has increased by 40 percent in the past few years. More people want to visit national parks, maybe because gas is cheap, or because our population has increased, or are more people drawn to nature, as our society becomes more urbanized?

I don’t know how to solve the problem of too many people, except to set aside more lands for preservation and beauty. But, even with the crowds, I want to believe that most park visitors come away with some new appreciation of nature.  

I think of the people on the trail in the Grand Valley (on the western side of the park) in June who stopped to eagerly tell us to watch for the moose and calf ahead in the willows. I think of how excited people, especially children, get when they see a chipmunk or marmot (below). Or the visitors on top of Trail Ridge Road  throwing snowballs at each other. Or the children discovering how much fun it is to climb rocks. Or visitors at Lily Lake excitedly watching the muskrats swim along the shore. Or the tourists on top of Trail Ridge lined up to watch storm clouds move up the valley.

Last month a bus driver told me that a SUV driver had told an elderly volunteer to “fuck off” after the volunteer told him couldn’t double park while waiting for a parking spot. I like to think that this man, who apparently arrived with his urban aggression, will leave as a slightly changed human being. Maybe after a week of being in a totally different environment, laughing at the antics of a ground squirrel, hiking to a clear alpine lake, viewing the world from 10,000 feet, listening to the sound of the creek, inhaling the sweet smell of pine or watching storms form over the mountains, he’ll leave with an expanded view of the world. My hope is that he’ll be infused just for a while with the beauty and peace of this still rugged and wild place.

Even with all the crowds, there’s still something real here, some elemental and wild part of life that recharges our souls. Maybe that’s the main value of our national parks: that we experience a different world than our urbanized, technological one.

Fading Out

I go to great lengths to avoid the crowds in Rocky Mountain National Park. Monday, it was in the low 50s and raining hard when I arrived at the Fern Creek trailhead.

There were four other cars there, only a few other crazy people out on a day like this: a couple of fishers, a few people stalking elk in Moraine Park, a family of four from Minnesota (I guess they’re used to rainy days) and a group of teenagers heading for Fern Lake and a cold, wet overnight camping experience that they’ll never forget.

Hiking on a rainy day presents an opportunity to see the landscape in a different light—or lack of it. The forests of tall pines and spruces along the Big Thompson River are more somber than usual, although everything shines with an uncommon brilliance.  

The granite boulders glisten in hues of metal gray, alabaster and rust, covered with splotches of mint green lichen. Raindrops cling to the aspen leaves and drop quietly from the pines. A dead tree strump (below) becomes a bronzed sculpture. And lines of rain on the aspen trunks are as delicate as a Japanese etching.

On top of the cliffs (top), wisps of clouds and fog partially obscure the outlines of ponderosas, the white fog morphing into the pale gray rock face. The distant mountains are mostly obscured in clouds, although occasionally the clouds part to reveal a tall triangular peak still holding patches of snow.

It’s uncommonly quiet—just the sound of water dripping and a few bird calls piercing the dark forest. With all this moisture, small streams have sprouted on the the hillsides.

The next day when the sun returns so will the crowds: people jockeying for a parking spot, picnicking along the river, heading up to the falls and taking plenty of photos. But for just one day, I experienced a different place. 

Climate Change Up Close

One of the disadvantages of being rooted in one place for several decades is that I can see often dramatic changes in the landscape, and not necessarily good ones. On the Cub Lake trail in Rocky Mountain National Park I’m increasingly getting the sense that I’m watching climate change in action.

When I first discovered the trail some 30 years ago, I was thrilled to find small ponds along the trail that wound through the valley up to the lake. I would sit on a rock along the shore and watch the ducks and salamanders, the green sedges bowing in the wind. Along the trail were small groves of aspen that got thicker and taller as you climbed. Starting in late spring, the valley was a sea of grasses that turned bronze every fall.

But 30 years later, the landscape has changed drastically. Most of the ponds have dried up or shrunk, hastened by  a warmer, drier climate. A fire five years ago charred most of the aspens, leaving behind black skeletal trunks.

Last year’s dry winter caused its own kind of stress, and many pine trees are dead or dying, their needles gone or turned orange. Willow bushes suffered a double whammy: the bushes that didn’t dry up and die in the winter had their branches broken by the late May snowstorm. We’ve had dry winters and May snowstorms before but never this dry nor this much snow—three feet in some places.

Cub Lake itself is quickly becoming a marsh (right). Every year, the water lilies form a tighter circle around the lake, so today the open water is getting smaller and smaller, a small blue pupil in an eye of plants.  About a decade ago, I sat on one side of the lake and watched, in some apprehension, as a moose swam across the lake directly toward me. Today, the moose would have to walk across.

Across the lake is a hillside of dead brown pine trees, a result of the same fire, which happened in October, an unusual time for a fire because in most years it’s too cold then for a fire to roar down the mountainside like this one did. But 2012 was the warmest year on record in the  United States and the warmest November in 100 years.

That area of the park had not seen a fire for 800 years, and a lot of trees were already dead or stressed from the pine beetle, which has devastated so much of Colorado’s forests; our winters don't get cold enough anymore to kill the insect. It was a fire waiting to happen, even in October, and the fire was so hot that some firefighters reported it was burning underneath the snow. It wasn’t completely extinguished until December.

This slow devastation of the landscape breaks my heart. And yet, I wonder if it's a case of knowing too much. On the trail this summer, I stopped to talk to a couple who were visiting from Kansas. They didn’t see the all the losses I did. They only saw the beauty of these mountains and were just happy to be here. And so, I look for what’s here—the green grasses and columbine growing among the charred trees, and the young aspen shoots pushing up into a new and quickly changing world.