Rocky Mountain National Park

I drove Trail Ridge Road in the last week of September and the aspens in the Kawuneeche Valley on the west side were already past peak, the gold going to rust and brown, but the light on the tundra at twelve thousand feet was something else entirely — a horizontal, almost archaeological light that illuminated every rock and lichen and grass stem with the specificity of a forensic examination. The road climbs out of Estes Park, passes through the montane forest of spruce and fir, then breaks above treeline at 11,400 feet and stays there for the next eleven miles. This is what Trail Ridge Road does that no other paved road in the United States does: it takes you into the alpine tundra and leaves you there long enough that it begins to feel like your natural habitat.

The tundra is not empty. This is the first thing to understand, and the thing that took me longer than I expected to learn. At first glance the plateau above treeline appears to be grass and rock and sky. Then you slow down. The cushion plants are there — moss campion, alpine sandwort, sky pilot — growing in mats a centimeter thick that represent forty years of accumulated growth, engineered to withstand wind and cold and ultraviolet radiation by evolving to stay very small and very low to the ground. The marmots are fat and deliberate, gathering weight for their seven-month hibernation. In early July, before I arrived, the tundra wildflowers bloom in a display that visitors describe as shocking, the color entirely out of proportion to the scale of the individual plants.

The elk rut in September is the most primal spectacle I’ve seen in North America. Bull elk weighing seven hundred pounds gather harems of cows in the meadows around Horseshoe Park and Moraine Park, and the bugling fills the valley — a sound that starts high and whistling and drops to a deep, resonant grunt, carrying for miles in the cold mountain air. I stood at the edge of Horseshoe Park one morning at six-thirty when the light was barely sufficient and watched three bulls move through the meadow fog, their antlers spreading four feet from tip to tip, their breath pluming in the cold. The cows moved between them with an elaborate deliberateness. No one spoke. The bugling echoed off the mountains across the valley. It was, in the most complete sense of the word, wild.

Bear Lake and the trail system above it are where most visitors spend their time in summer, and for good reason: the emerald lake, the reflections of the Continental Divide, the accessible trails to Nymph Lake and Dream Lake and Emerald Lake above that. But the park has 350 miles of trails, and most of them see almost no one. I spent a day on the Flattop Mountain trail, climbing from Bear Lake to the summit of the Divide at 12,324 feet, and crossed into the Never Summer Wilderness on the west side where the Kawuneeche Valley stretched below me in long afternoon light and I didn’t see another person for three hours.

Estes Park, the gateway town, is a tourist mill with traffic and gift shops that I find genuinely exhausting, but the Stanley Hotel on the hill above town — the inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining — has a veranda and a bar and a view of the park that makes one drink last an entire evening.

When to go: Late September for the elk rut and the aspens. July for wildflowers and the full opening of Trail Ridge Road. Winter access is limited to the east side of the park below timberline — the snowshoeing around Bear Lake is excellent and the crowds disappear entirely. Timed entry permits are required in summer; book through Recreation.gov as far ahead as possible.