Trail Ridge Road: Many Parks Curve to Milner Pass

Next, we're heading to Rainbow Curve, which looks straight down on Horseshoe Park.

As the road climbs, the forest changes around you. Lower down, the montane forest is ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and lodgepole pine. Above Many Parks Curve, the road enters the subalpine forest, which runs from about nine thousand to eleven thousand feet. Here the trees are mostly subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce. Where fire has burned, lodgepole pine often moves in first, because its seedlings thrive in sunlight, and over time the spruce and fir take back over.

Not far above the curve, the road cuts through a band of dark, reddish-brown rock known as the Iron Dike. It's an old intrusion of andesite into the granite, rich in magnetite, and it runs about forty miles across the Front Range, from south of Boulder to the northwest.

Horseshoe Park, below Rainbow Curve, is a low meadow with small lakes and top-notch wildlife watching: bighorn sheep, moose and elk. It also comes with an animal story. Elk were once plentiful in this country. Then, as settlers moved into the Estes Valley, they hunted them hard and shipped much of the meat to market in Denver. By 1890, few, if any, were left.

In 1913 and 1914, just before the park was established, the Estes Valley Improvement Association and the U.S. Forest Service brought in forty-nine elk from Yellowstone. At about the same time, an all-out campaign set out to wipe out predators here, including the gray wolf and the grizzly bear. With few predators left and little management, the elk came back quickly. Too quickly. By the late 1990s their numbers had reached record highs, and they were wearing down the plants and the other wildlife that depend on them. Today the park manages for a more natural herd of six to eight hundred elk wintering in its low valleys.

They're big animals. A bull can weigh seven hundred to a thousand pounds and stand five feet at the shoulder, and his antlers can grow up to an inch a day, reaching as much as forty pounds.

Elk follow the seasons. In summer, the herds climb up to the tundra to feed. In autumn they come back down to the meadows for the rut, and the bulls bugle: a deep call that rises fast into a high squeal, then drops into grunts. The word rut comes from the Latin for roar.

Horseshoe Park has another famous visitor. In late spring and early summer, bighorn sheep come down from the high country to Sheep Lakes, where they eat the soil for minerals they can't find up high. Their visits are hit and miss, usually between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon. Anywhere from one to sixty sheep come down from the ridge, cross the road and stay for two or three hours before heading back up. Crossing the highway stresses them, so in those months rangers stop traffic and let the sheep walk across.

Horseshoe Park also carries the mark of a sudden disaster. In 1982, the earthen dam at Lawn Lake gave way. A devastating wall of water came down, sweeping away vegetation and debris, and what it left behind formed the Alluvial Fan. The boulder field and sediment you can still see there are what remains of that flood.

Next, we're heading to Forest Canyon Overlook. Up here the road follows a much older route.

People have used this country for more than ten thousand years. The Ute people are the oldest continuous residents of Colorado and of this park. They lived in the high country in summer and moved down toward the plains for winter. As one of their elders, Clifford Duncan, put it, his people have always been mountain people.

The old trail along this ridge ran from Middle Park, on the far side of the range, through Estes Park, where game was plentiful, and down to the plains. It was used from time immemorial, by more than one nation. The ridge takes its name from it, and so does the road. Near the head of Forest Canyon, travelers crossed the Divide at a place now called Forest Canyon Pass. Part of the old route survives as a park trail, which leaves the road at a small turnout on this stretch.

In the summer of 1914, the year before the park was created, the Colorado Mountain Club invited three Arapaho elders from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Sherman Sage, Gun Griswold and Tom Crispin, on a two-week pack trip through these mountains, to record the names their people had given the landmarks. One of those names was for this ridge. In their language it means the child's trail. The way was so steep that children couldn't ride. They had to get down and walk.

Today the park consults the tribes whose homelands these mountains are, nation to nation, when its work may affect them. The name on the map is a reminder of who walked here first.

Next, we're heading to Rock Cut, and the story of how this road was built.

The first road over these mountains, the Fall River Road, was finished in 1920. It was narrow, with stretches as steep as sixteen percent, and clearing its snow each spring was a long, hard fight. By the middle of the 1920s, the Park Service was looking for something better.

In the summer of 1926, an engineer named S. A. Wallace came to the park from the Bureau of Public Roads. He'd recently worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, and in those days, the experts in laying out mountain routes were railroad men. With the park superintendent and the Park Service's landscape architect, he scouted the high country, and the search narrowed almost at once to this ridge. The survey went on through the winter, so the crew could see where the snow piled up. Wallace laid out the road on a five percent grade, with short stretches up to seven.

Work on this eastern section began in the fall of 1929. Ordinary drills wouldn't go through the frozen tundra, so new equipment had to be designed. Crews could only work about four months a year, in thin air and high wind, and at the peak, a hundred and fifty laborers were on the job, along with gas-powered shovels, tractors and horses. One shovel was taken to the top and worked east from Fall River Pass, and by August of 1930 it had reached the spot now called Rock Cut.

They tried hard not to scar the place. They protected rock pinnacles with log cribbing, set loose rocks lichen side up and saved slabs of tundra sod to lay back along the shoulders.

There was never an official dedication. In July 1932, the local paper announced the road would open the next day. Tourists had already been using it quietly that summer, whenever it was safe.

Next, we're heading to Lava Cliffs. From this part of the road, the Old Fall River Road can be seen to the north, climbing its last grades toward the pass. It was the first road to the tundra, and it has a rough history.

The State of Colorado and two counties built it to bring tourists over the mountains. In late July of 1913, a convict camp was set up down in Horseshoe Park, and a crew of thirty-eight men started work. Convict labor, and then contractors, kept at it for seven years. In September of 1920, the park superintendent finally drove from Estes Park over the top to Grand Lake, and on around through Denver, completing the loop the builders had been working toward.

Keeping it open was another matter. Every spring, crews fought the snow with everything they had: men with shovels, tractors, scrapers, a steam shovel, an early rotary snowplow, and explosives set in the drifts in autumn and detonated in spring.

The old road is still there. Today it's unpaved and one way, uphill only, open to cars for a few months each summer, and it ends at the Alpine Visitor Center.

Meanwhile, the plants out here have their own ways of living where trees can't. Many are cushion plants: tight, ground-hugging clumps that look like moss and stay below the wind blowing just a few inches above them, anchored by long taproots. Others have dense hairs on their stems and leaves to break the wind, or red pigments that turn sunlight into heat. Some take two or more years just to form a flower bud, which waits out the winter below the surface and opens in the few weeks of summer. On the rocks are lichens, which never flower at all. They can keep photosynthesizing at any temperature above freezing.

Next, we're heading to Gore Range Overlook, just past the top of the road. Up here, the snow keeps the calendar.

In the spring of 2019, the park's road crew found drifts along Trail Ridge Road as high as twenty-one feet. Every year, plow operators start clearing in the middle of April. One crew works up from the east side of the park, another from the west, and they move along the road until they meet at the Alpine Visitor Center.

In the road's early years, the crews used dynamite. Where snow lay deeper than four or five feet, they blasted about forty feet of snowbank at a time, then sent in the rotary plow right away, before the broken snow could pack hard again. In their first season, they went through more than five thousand pounds of TNT.

Next, we're heading to the Alpine Visitor Center, at Fall River Pass. People have been stopping at this pass since the old Fall River Road first crossed it.

The Park Service began building here in the 1920s, simple rustic buildings with local stone walls: a ranger station that housed a small museum for a time, and a rest house that sold Native American curios and later grew into the Trail Ridge Store. In those days there were few formal trails, and visitors wandered wherever they liked across the tundra.

After the Second World War, visitors came in far greater numbers, and scientists began to study what all those feet were doing to the tundra. Then came Mission 66, the Park Service's ten-year push to modernize the national parks. It brought a new kind of building, the visitor center: one stop to meet a ranger, see a museum, buy a souvenir and step out into the landscape. The Alpine Visitor Center opened in 1965. It's the highest visitor center in the entire national park system.

Next, we're heading to Medicine Bow Curve, the northernmost point on Trail Ridge Road, where the view swings north toward Wyoming.

Next, we're heading to Milner Pass, on the Continental Divide.

The pass is named for T. J. Milner, an ambitious railroad promoter who surveyed a rail route across the Divide here. Like many of the routes surveyed in the 1880s, his line was never built. No railroad ever reached this park at all; it would be the automobile that opened it up.

The Continental Divide runs the length of the Americas, from Alaska to Cape Horn in Chile. When rain falls on it, a few feet decide everything. Water on the east side heads for the Atlantic. Water on the west side heads for the Pacific. At this pass, the water running northeast goes down the Poudre into the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi, and on to the Gulf of Mexico. The water running southwest goes down Beaver Creek into the North Fork of the Colorado River, and if nobody diverts it on the way, all the way to the Gulf of California. People have been diverting it for a long time. Up in the Never Summer Range, the Grand Ditch catches the very source of the Colorado River and sends it east, to farms and towns like Greeley and Fort Collins.

You might wonder why the Divide crosses the road here, more than a thousand feet lower than Fall River Pass. That's because the Divide doesn't follow the highest peaks. It follows the heads of the watersheds, wherever the water happens to part.

On the way down, you drop back below treeline, into the spruce and fir, at around eleven thousand feet. Along this stretch there are glimpses of Specimen Mountain. Its Arapaho name means where it smokes, perhaps for the clouds and summer showers that gather around it. It's built of layer upon layer of volcanic rock: ash-flow tuff, basaltic andesite and rhyolite.

High country like this is home to the animal the park chose as its symbol, the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, the largest wild sheep in North America. A big ram can weigh more than three hundred pounds, and his horns alone can weigh thirty. The ewes are about half that size, with smaller horns that curve to a sharp point. Wide-set eyes give them a broad field of view, and their hooves have rough soles that grip like climbing shoes on the cliffs. Lambs are born in spring and walk soon after birth. Young rams leave their mothers' group at two to four years old, but the ewes stay with their herd for life. In the fall, rams settle who's in charge by rearing up and charging at each other at up to forty miles an hour, and the crash of their horns can be heard up to a mile away. They graze on grasses in summer and browse shrubs in fall and winter, and a four-part stomach lets them get the most out of hard, dry food. That's the secret of how they eat safely: they swallow a lot quickly, then retreat to cliffs and ledges to rechew it in peace, out of reach of predators.