“I think the universe is on my side” – Echosmith
I’m kind of at a loss about how to write about today. The end was so spectacular that I feel like I should lead with that. Perhaps now that I’ve teased it you’ll stick around until the end. Last night we decided that we would take this morning easy. We knew that our scheduled backpacking trip would only take 2 or 3 hours at most, so tossed around the idea of doing some other hiking first. While I would have loved to be able to return to Lake Haiyhai, my favorite spot in the world, sore legs and the promise of sleeping in and a nice breakfast won out.
The sleeping in part didn’t go too well for me. I think my body is too conditioned to early mornings. I guess that’s something to look forward to once the trip is over. I was able to enjoy a cup of coffee on the patio of our hotel while watching a mountain stream roar by. The breakfast, in contrast, worked out wonderfully. We found a second restaurant in Estes Park that isn’t awful, Notchtop.
We were all starving since we hadn’t really recovered from yesterday’s Ida hike. The large pizza, beer, and ice cream we had last night only made a dent in the day’s calorie deficit. We made up for in this morning by having a cinnamon roll appetizer which I followed with a carnivore omelet, potatoes, and a homemade biscuit. We also managed to mostly do our final load of laundry for the trip while eating.
I say mostly because we soon discovered that the dryer had only sort of worked. We knew that we needed to repack bags for tonight’s backpacking trip so stopped in the Aluvial Fan parking lot to reconfigure. We drew many odd looks as well as quite a few comments as we had laundry drying over every possible surface. After half an hour or so we managed to get all the right stuff back into all the right bags. The dry mountain air and warm sun also managed to do most of the work the dryer hadn’t in that time.
Since we still had a couple hours to kill we decided to drive up the Old Fall River Road, a secret backdoor route to RMNP’s Alpine Visitor’s Center. The drive up was aptly described as a vehicular nature trail on the Park’s website. It was a very different drive than Trail Ridge Road. It lacked the big expansive mountain views the newer road provides, but also lacked the hordes of morons. At the top the girls earned their junior ranger badges, we picked up a couple souviners, and had some bison bratwurst.
Finally, at 3 o’clock we decided that we’d stalled long enough. It was time to head to Bear Lake and hope they’d let us in. An hour later as we pulled toward the lot the ranger gods smiled on as. The ranger in charge of turning people away picked up her traffic cone and allowed us in.
We geared up and headed toward Bear Lake where the crowds were amassed to see one of the most popular, but also least impressive, attractions of Rocky Mountain. We confidently strolled by and turned into the trail that would take us up and away from them. The hike was a somber experience for me. We walked through alpine forest most of the way with occasional glimpses of distant mountains. For the first three miles we climbed 1,200 feet at a fairly steady pace.
Then, we rounded a corner and caught our first glimpse of Lake Odessa 600 feet down and a mile ahead of us. It was surrounded on three sides by snowy cliffs with waterfalls running down in several places as the snowmelt joined the lake. We finished the rest of the hike and found a group of rocks to have dinner on as we watched the scene in front of us. While it’s sad that this is the last hike of #RTXVIII I can’t think of a more appropriate and beautiful way to end it.