Estes Park is a favorite relaxing mountain getaway for Denver city dwellers. Only 90 minutes away, Denverites can get up on a Saturday morning and be taking a mid morning stroll in Rocky Mountain National Park or be having brunch at one of  Estes Parks many outstanding restaurants.

At 7,522 feet above sea level, the Village of Estes Park is 2,242 feet higher than Denver and surrounded by mountains on all four sides.

Estes Park is a four season destination with mountain flowers coming to life, a glacial melt river that runs right through downtown and Elk that are calving in the Spring. The Summer season is packed with family activities, festivals and shopping that caters to the out of  town guest. Fall brings refreshing mountain temperatures, wonderful hiking, bugling Elk and beautiful Aspen tree colors. The Winter season is perfect to get away and enjoy snow shoeing by day and a crackling fireplace in one of Estes Parks many mountain lodges.

Highlights include: Trail Ridge Road, an aerial tramway, shopping, dramatic views, a historic landmark hotel, fishing, hiking, and golf.

GuideSpot lists Estes Park as a Great Weekend Getaway Near Denver
TripAdviser says “Elk and bighorn sheep roam around the town, vying for attention with art galleries, museums and the landmark Stanley Hotel, star of Stephen King’s “The Shining.” Excellent Romantic Vacations say that Estes Park has the Most Romantic Cabins in Colorado.

Lake Estes in Estes Park Colorado

Spring is in the air and after our enchanting winter season, many of you may be ready to trade in your snow shoes for hiking boots! There are so many things to do in and around Estes Park during the spring that we thought we would share our top 10 outdoor destinations in our Rocky Mountain backyard.

1. Gem Lake Loop

A popular year-round hike is the Gem Lake Loop.  Located two miles from town along Devils Gulch Road, the trail begins at the Lumpy Ridge Trail Head and climbs steeply through private land.  Once you pause to catch your breath, look behind you at the panoramic views of the Continental Divide. The loop is about a mile and a half and takes about an hour, even if you stop and smell the flowers.

2. Homer Rouse Memorial Trail

A local favorite is the Homer Rouse Trail, a pleasant three-mile round trip along the old right-of-way between Fish Creek and Lily Lake.  The rarely crowded trail is open to runners, cyclists, horseback riders and those exercising their dogs.

Park your car in the lot next to Fish Creek Road and walk the gravel road south along the border of Cheley Camp.  To your left the meadow opens up to horse herds grazing under the watchful eye of Twin Sisters Mountain.  After a half mile,  the gravel road turns into a path that winds through a thick evergreen forest

3.  Enjoy a ride around Lake Estes

The path around sparkling Lake Estes is a 3.8-mile journey of beauty.

Park at the Visitor Center parking lot and unloaded your bicycle or rent one of ours. As you start your exploration, you’ll see Longs Peak reflected in the lake’s still waters and family’s of ducks enjoying the spring weather. Passing under a bridge, you may spy some fly fisherman stalking that perfect trout. After returning to the visitor center, you may want to take a stroll down our river walk to enjoy a refreshing beverage at any one of our local shops.

4. Take a Walk To Birch Ruins

Feel like stretching your legs and visiting a little local Colorado history?  Take a few minutes and walk to the stone ruins perched atop a 75-foot-high rock outcropping overlooking Estes Park’s Elkhorn Avenue, the town’s main street.

Cross the bridge at the north edge of the municipal parking lot and follow the path along Black Canyon Creek. To reach the ruins, continue along the path as it loops around to the north and gains altitude to the top of the Knoll. Before you know it you’re standing before the remains of a massive stone fireplace and turn-of-the-century stone masonry. The ruined walls frame a bird’s eye view of the village of Estes Park below.

5. Golf in Estes Park

Estes Park boasts two beautiful golf courses.

Estes Park 18-Hole Golf Course
Designed in 1917 by Dick Phelps and Henry Hughes, the Estes Park 18-Hole Golf Course is a par 71 regulation, 6,321-yard course that sits in a natural valley surrounded by spectacular mountains. The course opens April 15 so call 866-586-8146, ext 0 for tee times.

Lake Estes 9-Hole Executive Golf Course
If time’s at a premium, play the Lake Estes 9-Hole Executive Golf Course.  The 2,209-yard course, with five par 3?s and four par 4?s, snakes around the Big Thompson River next to Lake Estes.  The course will close April 15 and re-open for the summer season on May 13.  Call 970-586-8176 for tee times.

6. Picnic at Lily Lake

A short drive up Highway 7 from Estes Park, you find the stunning alpine Lily Lake with stunning views of Longs Peak and Mount Meeker.

The lake has sturdy picnic tables on the east shore and seems to be a favorite location for family reunions. The picnic tables are conveniently located near the parking lot but nestled up agains the shore of the lake. After lunch, why not take a stroll along the 0.8 mile handicap accessible path?  It is level and lined with logs, so it’s perfect for a wheelchair or a leisurely stroll?

7. Enjoy and photograph stunning birds

Bird watchers throng to the Matthews-Reeser Bird Sanctuary on the south side of Lake Estes during the spring migration.  Our pristine, high-elevation habitat is home to more than 280 bird species, everything from hummingbirds and red tailed hawks to flycatchers, vireos, swallows, wrens, thrushes and warblers. Peregrine falcons make the Lumpy Ridge their home, and climbing routes are closed each year to protect their nesting areas.

8. Come see the Elk

Where are the Elk? It’s a question we get asked, but in the Spring they’re not very hard to find! A quick trip around the golf course or even down town will almost guarantee a sighting of these majestic creatures. But they can be elusive sometimes, which makes spotting them even more rewarding. The elk herds go wherever the big bull tells them to go.  They don’t care about Park boundaries or fences built to keep them out.  They roam free and wild through Estes Park. Just the way we like it!

9. Enjoy a day fishing

In the mountain streams and lakes of Rocky Mountain National Park, are four species of trout; German brown, rainbow, brook, and cutthroat. These are cold water fish and great for sport fishing. The lakes and streams surround and running through Estes Park also offer great fishing opportunities.

10. Expand your horizons in Rocky Mountain National Park

Rocky Mountain National Park’s 415 square miles encompass and protect spectacular mountain environments. Enjoy Trail Ridge Road – which crests over 12,000 feet including many overlooks to experience the subalpine and alpine worlds – along with over 300 miles of hiking trails, wildflowers, wildlife, starry nights, and fun times.

Here at least 60 mountains exceed 12,000 feet, topping off at 14,259 feet on the football field-sized summit of Longs Peak. Names such as Cirrus, Chiefs Head, Isolation, Mummy, and Storm evoke the grandeur of this high landscape.

Those are our top 10 things to do in Estes Park this spring. What are some of yours?

Courtesy of: Valhalla Resort

WHAT’S NEW

Journey to the Top! A Trail Ridge Road Bus Adventure. The Rocky Moutain Nature Association introduces a new excursion for 2012 that journeys through the National Park to the top of the nation’s highest continuous paved road, Trail Ridge Road. The family-friendly adventure is offered various dates from June to September.

VALUE PACKED DEALS

Rocky Mountain Explorer Packages. Partnering with Rocky Mountain Nature Association, guests at Rocky Mountain Park Inn can add more value to their stay through the property’s signature explorer packages. The packages include one-night accommodations for two, two passes to select educational field seminars, breakfast credit, boxed lunch in a souvernir backpack and a seven-day pass to Rocky Mountain National Park. As an added giving back bonus, a portion of the package proceeds go the the Rocky Mountain Next Generation Fund to support educational programs for youth.

EVENTS

Wool Market. Home to one of the largest natural fiber markets in the nation, the annual Estes Park Wool Market festival in June includes two days of wool exhibits, sheep-to-shawl weaving demonstrations, sheepherding, fleece competitions and vendor booths featuring natural wool products.

Not to Miss: Wildflower Hikes from late May to early July; Fly Fishing with lessons and tours; Museum Hopping to the Historic Fall River Hydroplant Museum where families can create electricty and view original machinery used by F.O. Stanley to power his hotel and the MacGregor Ranch Museum, one of the nation’s last working ranches that also doubles as a youth agricultural education center.

It was later in my childhood when I realized Santa was a billboard mural designed and built just for the season. All the murals were created between 1958 and 1966. All are individually lit and provide a special addition to the ambience of the holiday season. They even erected a depiction of the Old Woman in the Shoe with all those children crawling in and out of windows. One mural helped my understand the meaning of Christmas with the Three Wise Men and the sheep standing on the hillside as they pointed toward a lighted star. They’ve all been refurbished now, but their presence evokes the essence of a simpler time.

Over the years, the village has become more magical.  Even with my childhood fantasies erased, a new magic replaces my visions. Thousands and thousands of tiny white lights adorn all the trees throughout the downtown area.  Leading into the village are 120 colorful trees hanging from streetlamp poles.

Last weekend about 300 people kicked off the season with an old-fashioned tree lighting ceremony in Bond Park. By Monday night all those twinkling lights called out to me.

And now there’s a nighttime lighted parade that’s become an essential element of the tradition that calls out to thousands of people. It started in the late 1980s and is held the day after Thanksgiving. The first three years, the parade was billed as “Santa’s Storybook Parade” and featured all walking characters. Today there are 40 floats, as couple of bands and a few other marching units. All the groups are decorated with lights.

As an adult, I cannot imagine a Christmas without the parade or a place where I’ve enjoyed the holidays more. Christmas in Estes Park is my tradition.

And I still love seeing Santa fly across the sky.

I shrugged and gave the visitors from out-of-town the palms up—I didn’t have a clue.  The elk had gathered every day for the past month on the 9-hole golf course, but after a recent snow they had disappeared.  Not an elk in sight.

“Don’t you have a reserve where you keep the elk?” the visitor asked, a little frustrated.

Nope.  Estes Park isn’t a zoo.  The elk herds go wherever the big bull tells them to go.  They don’t care about Park boundaries or fences built to keep them out.  In fact, they’re probably in my backyard right now, rubbing their antlers on our deck and scaring the cat.

In reality, wildlife appears when you least expect it.  One morning I walked out to get the newspaper at the boxes on Upper Broadview, and a massive bull elk stood in the middle of the road, pawing the dirt and staring at me with thinly-disguised malevolence.  Maybe I could get around behind him, but he shifted his position to keep me in his field of vision.  OK.  I’d get my Rockies scores later.

One late afternoon while doing the dishes, I looked out the kitchen window and saw two young bobcats stop in our yard, stretch and yawn, and continue on their way.  I ran outside with the camera but they had disappeared.  This rare sighting reminded me of the morning I was walking to work along Riverside Drive and saw a cat, a big cat…a mountain lion, I realized suddenly, walking toward me.  I stopped, stepped back a few paces, and watched nervously as the cat looked at me with disinterest, licked its chops, and loped up the side of Prospect Mountain.

Of course, there are the ground squirrels who have constructed an underground complex in our yard, the owl who greets me with a gentle whooo, whooo when I bring the garbage can in at dusk, the coyotes who wake me at 4 a.m. and the mother bear and her two cubs who climbed a tree in our back yard and stopped traffic along Marys Lake Road for an hour.

But the elk?  They could be anywhere at anytime, and that’s the cool thing about Estes Park.

My wife Lori and I woke early Sunday morning and drove to Bear Lake through aspen groves in their full glory.  We parked in the lot and walked around Bear Lake before hiking up a steep trail into a patch of orange aspen.  I was content to hang out in the aspen, take a million pictures, and breathe in the clear, crisp air of fall as the leaves rustled like paper coins around me.  But Lori was on the go, up the steep Flattop Trail before I could catch my breath.

By name alone, one would expect the Flattop Trail to be flat.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The trail climbs aggressively west, with the occasional vistas through the pines of Longs Peak in the distance.  Below us groves of yellow aspen smudged the green-carpeted mountains.  We could see tiny Alberta Falls, like a white fingernail clipping, in a distant valley.

I’d long soaked through my shirt and stripped off my fleece as we climbed through a forest that had changed from the long-needled pines to spruce and fir trees.  Young couples vaulted past us, intent on the summit.  We slowed as our legs turned to jelly and we labored to breath.  Good heavens, how much farther were we going?

Lori stopped at the Dream Lake Overlook.  Longs Peak dominated the skyline to the south and below we could hear people talking as they walked along Dream Lake. Hallett Peak towered above us.

Yes, this was the perfect destination for a crystal-blue fall day.

According to the U.S. Forest Service: “A warm wet spring, favorable summer weather, and warm sunny fall days with cool nights should produce the most brilliant autumn colors.”

That sounded like the Rocky Mountains in Northern Colorado to me.

My wife Lori and I drove to the Upper Beaver Meadows turnoff, just a couple miles from the Beaver Meadows entrance.  It was around 9:30 a.m. but there were plenty of parking spots at the trailhead.

We walked through a meadow the grasses turning a golden brown and into a forest of ponderosa pine.  We heard a bull elk bugle in the distance, but it seemed far away, perhaps in the trees along the moraine that separated Beaver Meadows from Moraine Park.

We walked along the beginning of the Ute Trail that takes you above tree line to the tundra and Trail Ridge Road.  About ten minutes later a hiker approached from the other direction.  She looked distressed.

“A bear and her two cubs are on the trail,” she exclaimed.   “The mother stared into my eyes.”

Things get dangerous when you get between a mother bear and her cubs, so we changed our hiking destination.  We backtracked down the Ute Trail and turned south at the intersection that took us to the moraine.

We passed by a ravine thick with aspen.  The trees were still green, but a lighter green and dry, rattling like tiny cymbals in the breeze.  It seemed to us that they were on the verge of turning.  We climbed to the top of the moraine and the grand expanse of Longs Peak appeared, its shoulders dusted with snow.  We found a rock in the sun and enjoyed the view.  The only changing aspen we saw were tiny patches in the distance.

We didn’t see any changing aspen close up, but that didn’t change a wonderful morning in the mountains.  We expect next weekend to be glorious and the peak to come soon thereafter.

At Alberta Falls we pulled off a layer as

a fellow nearby snapped a picture of the most popular waterfall in the Park.

Just feet from the falls Lori spotted a fawn jump across the trail.  Where was the mother?  A moment later we spied her hiding in the rocks.  We gave the mother some space as she leaped across the trail and followed her fawn into the woods beyond.

At the junction of the Mills Lake turnoff, we dipped into a deep, thick forest that reminded me of a scene out of the “Lord of the Rings.”  The temperature dipped 20 degrees and we grabbed our fleece from our packs.  We walked across two new bridges, which replaced those washed out in May during the historic spring runoff.

At 8:15 a.m. we walked across smoothed granite and Mills Lake opened before us, cradled by Longs Peak to the left and McHenry’s Peak and Spearhead to the right.  The sun had yet to peek out from behind Half Mountain, so we settled on a rock outcropped that jutted into the lake and enjoyed the quiet solitude of a windless morning, Mount McHenry reflected in the still water.  It was so quiet we could hear waterfalls cascade down a mountainside in the distance.

Was the water from Shelf and Solitude Lakes?

While we waited for the sun’s appearance, we spotted a splash of orange, yellow and green to the right of Half Mountain.  “Look at the sundog,” my wife exclaimed.

The sun came over the mountain and hit our faces at 8:55 a.m.  We warmed up immediately, and with the sun on the water, we could see the trout swimming just inches from our boots.

After an hour relaxing at the lake, we headed back down the trail.  We reached our car at 11 a.m., reflecting on a morning well spent.

The show will also highlight $34.2 million worth of improvements Rocky Mountain National Park made on 38.7 miles of Trail Ridge since 2005, the most major work since the highway was completed in 1932.

If you live out-of-state, an online version of the show will be posted on the Internet by next week.

And it was Estes Park that brought them here.

Why? Because there is something for everyone at a family reunion in Colorado.  One afternoon our east coast family organized a “regatta” at the Estes Park Marina while another group hopped on mountain bikes and rode Devils Gulch Road to the Glen Haven Store for their world famous cinnamon rolls.

Our golfers hit the links at Estes Park’s spectacular golf course while my son took his cousins to his “secret” fishing spot along the Big Thompson River.

No visit to Estes Park would be complete without a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park.  I strapped on my hiking boots and took 30 plus family members up the steep trail to Gem Lake.

Those who enjoyed the experience hiked up to Sky Pond a couple days later and came back with spectacular pictures of the alpine lake.

One morning, we took several cars up Trail Ridge Road, stopping at Many Parks Curve, Rainbow Curve and the Rock Cut to take pictures.  We pulled into the big parking lot at the Alpine Visitor Center, located at nearly 12,000 feet above sea level.  Those who could breathe raced up “Huffer Hill,” while the more sensible shopped and grabbed a bite to eat.

The ladies enjoyed the shops along tree-shaded Elkhorn Avenue, with trips planned every afternoon.  They were so exhausted at the end of the day that they were forced to pamper themselves at a local spa.  With their eyebrows plucked and toenails painted, they enjoyed a relaxing massage next to the river.

Our senior generation enjoyed sitting on the deck and swapping family stories.  One morning they watched a small black bear run across the lawn and every afternoon enjoyed a friendly marmot who sunbathed on a nearby rock.

We’re a competitive bunch, so we conducted a miniature golf tournament, with bragging rights to follow.  Also, there were the go-kart races and the bumper boats, with a basketball game at Stanley Park’s outdoor courts.  Every evening we gathered for our family picnic in the cool Colorado air.  One night we hired local legend Cowboy Brad to sing and tell jokes.

Our extended family loved Estes Park so much; they returned several years later for another reunion.  If you’d like to organize a family or any type of reunion in Estes Park please let our give our Group Sales department a call at the Estes Park Visitor Center: 970-577-9900.