“The mountain trail is rich with the spice of life. Along its winding way is endless variety. It goes up into the heights and down into gorges. It greets the morning, is sometimes lost in shadows, oft-times is up near the stars or enveloped in clouds. Always it leads to some definite action, to some definite thought, to some happy result.”
- excerpt from Enos Mills’ Rocky Mountain National Park
At twelve thousand feet the winds blow mercilessly and the ravens caw and wheel through the air. In the valley below me the Fall River runs narrowly between towering granite peaks. Above tree-line, where the air is thin and my eyes water from the gusts, I feel a brimming emotion, like coming home after a long journey. There is no experience like that of literally being on top of the world, of sitting in the shelter of a tall boulder, watching marmots waddle around their dens and big horn sheep pick their way carefully up the slope. There is a certain grace that comes with making yourself vulnerable to the elements; putting yourself in a position of earthly insignificance, no more and no less important than the scattering of wildflowers around your feet.
For many hundreds of years this mountain corridor has been traversed by means of trails. The first trails were not consciously designed, but rather paths of least resistance. The Ute Trail (which shares the corridor with Trail Ridge Road) is widely considered the best representation of just such a “first trail” in Rocky Mountain National Park. Prehistoric nomads were the first to cross this corridor, then the Ute and Arapaho and Cheyenne, trappers and miners, intrepid explorers… and then those such as myself, wandering tourists. The tribes used the corridor to get to Spirit Lake (now Grand Lake), the source of the Colorado river.
In the early 1900s, towns such as Estes Park and Grand Lake began to attract enough tourists for the state to become interested. The American past-time of scenic motoring was on the rise and the state was looking for ways to capitalize on this new trend. In 1913 the Estes Park Protective and Improvement Association made a proposal to the state for a road that would connect Estes Park and Grand Lake by way of Fall River Valley and Milner Pass. The plan was for the construction to be done by convicts from a Colorado state penitentiary. Who can say if the motive for convict labor was a charitable attempt at rehabilitation through back-breaking work or just a money saving ploy? Most likely the latter since after only three miles the convicts were deemed too slow and private contractors took over the job, finishing the winding Fall River Road after seven years of toil.
For six years the Fall River Road was the only means of a direct route from Estes Park to Grand Lake. The drive was formidable even in the best of weather because of the steep grade and hair-raising switchbacks. Weak engines and gravity-fed fuel systems forced some early vehicles to drive back-wards up the mountain. Even today, visitors of the road are cautioned to use lower gears and turn off air conditioners to avoid overheated engines. In 1926, the Bureau of Public Roads sent a survey team to find an alternate, less arduous route through the pass. Trail Ridge Road was completed in 1932 and to this day is the highest continuous highway in the continental United States. The success and popularity of Trail Ridge Road caused the re-purposing of Fall River Road into a drivable nature trail. The eastern half was turned into a nine mile, one-way scenic drive called Old Fall River Road and the western half was either abandoned or paved over by the new highway. Improvements to Fall River Road have been infrequent in the last ninety years and you can still see the stone retaining walls built into the hillsides during the 1920s.
Each new mile of the Old Fall River road initiates the traveler into the wonders of a mountain ecosystem. The road begins at 8,558 in what is called the upper- montane zone. Stopping my car at the first switchback, I walked along a little trail into the mixed forest of Douglas-fir, quaking aspen, lodge-pole and ponderosa pines. I could hear a stream off to one side and the characteristic call of the mountain chickadee. Back in my car I passed mile marker one, the upper limit of the montane, and saw ahead the grand peak of Mount Chapin. Around the next corner was a sign that read Chasm Falls. As I hiked down the slippery granite path to gaze up at the twenty-five foot falls, the highest in Rocky Mountain National Park, two red squirrels chattered at me from the limb of a spruce. I continued to stop at each pull-out, noticing the subtle changes in forest life that came with the climb in altitude. Mile four marked 10,000 feet, the subalpine ecosystem, home to deep winter snows and dark, dense woods. Some subalpine trees can reach extraordinary heights of over one hundred feet if undisturbed by disease or fire. By the time I drove into the parking lot of the Alpine Visitor Center, I had passed through the Krummholz zone and into the alpine tundra. I stood looking down at the tree-line nearly one thousand feet below and gave an exhilarated laugh. What took early explorers days to negotiate, I had achieved comfortably in a few relaxed hours.
