Today we headed into Rocky Mountain National Park. Right off the road on the way in we spotted what looked to be an old, stone church right off the side of the road. The church is built on the base of a rock outcropping and looks like something that might have been there for centuries. Turns out Saint Malo’s has only been there since 1936 and they still hold mass at the chapel once a week. Pope John Paul II apparently visited the church and even hiked in the surrounding area. As this is obviously a proud moment for any Catholic Chapel, there was no shortage of photographic evidence. It is open to the public and we stopped to explore and take pictures because we like things made of rock.
Once in the park, we stopped into the visitor center for a ranger consult to see what options we had if we were only staying for a day or two. I love talking to the rangers in the national parks. Some are more enthusiastic than others, but they are always good sources of information, much better than fumbling around the internet to discover fun spots in the park. Also, I picked up my National Park Passport Book at the Grand Canyon and now need to fill it with as many stamps from the different parks that I can. I might be the only adult participating in the Passport stamp program, but that does not dull my enthusiam. At some point, as I rushed into a different visitor center to get a stamp, a gentleman slighhtly older than myself, asked what I was doing, and I had to sheepishly admit to my childish activity. He just laughed and basically said he didn’t berudge me the activity, we are all trying to reclaim and perfect our sometimes imperfect childhoods as we go along. It was a lovely thought – a different way of thinking about always remaining young at heart.
After talking to the ranger, we decided to do some short excursions from the Old Fall River Road. This is a one way road that leads you all the way up to the Alpine Visitor Center past some pretty spectacular sites as you wind your way up to the 11,796 foot elevation and into the alpine tundra. We stopped along the way to see the Alluvial Fan, which is a sort of waterfall created by flooding a few years back. It was such a short nice hike that even Malachi the Wonder Beast, despite his old man legs, went on it with us. Any awesome display of water always makes me happy and this one was a nice first stop. The drive to the top was pretty spectacular and we stopped a few more times along the way to see some awesome lookouts of more cataracts. You follow the river pretty much all the way to the top so there is a view around every corner. The mountains, as you go along, climb to greater heights, so that you are craning your head at ever corner to appreciate their grandeur. Near the top we hiked over some tundra for a mile or so and got a sight of some elk lazing in the grass below, paying us no mind whatsoever. It was pretty awesome day topped off by a nice fire back at camp. Rocky Mountain National Park is a great place to appreciate just how awesome and huge the Rocky Mountains are.
