Then we headed up U.S. 36 for Rocky Mountain National Park. It takes about an hour to get there from Boulder. We had been there in October 2005, and had crossed the park on the Trail Ridge Road, going back to Denver via Interstate 70. We weren’t sure that the Trail Ridge Road was currently open. Last week it shut down temporarily because of snow, and it was getting close to the time when snow would shut it down for the whole winter.
As we approached the national park from the town of Estes Park, we saw cars pulling off to the side of the road. Autumn is the season of the elk rut, when elk come down from the high country and the males fight to gather harems and mate. Now there was here a small herd of elk (about a dozen females, a couple of adolescent males off by themselves and one adult male with a large rack of antlers), peacefully grazing while people were frantically taking pictures from the road. As did I.We stopped at the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center. There we saw a 23-minute film about the park, then consulted with a couple of rangers about our options. The Trail Ridge Road was open but icy in spots, and there was a high wind advisory. We asked about Bear Lake, where there was a hike that looked interesting, to Emerald Lake and back, but the ranger said that they had just gotten notice that the Bear Lake parking lot was full. Glacier Gorge? That lot had been full at 8:30 that morning. With weather this nice (around 70 degrees and sunny) on a weekend, even though this was the off season, people were evidently crowding into the park. Instead, he suggested the walk to Cub Lake and back (4.6 miles, three hours), or else onward to the Pool and back to the Cub Lake trailhead via the Fern Lake trailhead (6.1 miles, four hours.
We decided to go down Bear Lake Road, to see what conditions were when we got there. If we couldn’t get in there, we could come back most of the way, turn off at Moraine Park and go to the Cub Lake trailhead. And that’s how it turned out. The drive to Bear Lake was beautiful, with the snow-covered Logan’s Peak and its neighbors directly ahead, with autumn colors (mostly the bright yellow of the aspen trees) mixed in with the dark greens of the pines and junipers. As we came up the last hairpin turn to Bear Lake, we were stopped by a line of cars ahead of us. As we got ahead a little, we saw cars pulling out of the line, making a U-turn and heading back down. There was a line of about a dozen cars stretching out of the parking lot, waiting for someone to leave. We decided not to wait, and also turned back down. The Glacier Gorge parking lot was also full, so we drove back to Moraine Park.
A digression: the word “park” is Coloradoese for “mountain meadow”— e.g., the town of Estes Park and the TV cartoon show “South Park” (set in suburban Denver).
Moraine Park is, indeed, a large, flat meadow, around which people were stopped to watch elk. Since we had already seen an elk herd, we turned off on a side road and went directly to the Cub Lake trailhead. First small parking lot: full. Second lot: full. Third lot: one available space, so we grabbed it.
There were a couple of picnic tables there, so we had our sandwiches, then we walked over to the trailhead and headed up to Cub Lake. Plenty of people were doing the same: a number with small children, a number substantially older than we were. First we crossed a bridge over a gully, then a bridge over a small stream. We spent about a quarter hour following the western edge of Moraine Park, in and out of pines and up and down over rocks. Then we gradually started up a small valley. At that point, a trail came in from the other side of the valley and we met a group of four or five people, men and women, who asked us how long the walk to Cub Lake would be from there. They were from a nearby YMCA camp. They were shocked when I told them it would take around an hour and a quarter from there, and after going up the trail a little, they turned around and went back. There were some ominous
dark clouds above the mountains, hiding the sun, so we wondered a little if maybe we should have turned back, too. We continued on gradually upward, then we saw the end of the valley ahead of us: a hillside with a yellow blaze of aspens at the top. Eventually, we found ourselves among those aspens, the yellow leaves littering the trail beneath our feet, and there the trail began to be substantially steeper. We came out above the aspens, into more pines, then the trail leveled out onto a sandy brushland, then into more pines, and we could see lily pads on the water ahead. Cub Lake, at last, after about 1 1/2 hours.The sun came out, gloriously. We sat on rocks by the water, with the white-tipped peaks in the distance, eating a raspberry scone. We were joined by a couple of very odd-looking (to us) birds. One looked like a bluejay, but bigger, and with a more metallic blue, and a fanned crest. The other was a little larger, mostly black,
but with a lot of white and a long tail with some blue in it. Later, I heard a very young girl call a similar bird a “magpie,” a name her father repeated. We were also joined by a chipmunk, obviously hoping for a handout, though signs repeatedly warned people not to feed the animals. We didn’t, but he might have picked up some of our crumbs.Then it was time to leave. Going down was faster and easier. Going up had been more difficult than we expected, especially since Lonely Planet called this an “easy” trail, and there were so many children and old people on it. Clearly, we were not yet used to the altitude (over 8000 feet). On the way, we met a couple from south of Denver. They had come up the loop, from the Fern Lake trailhead, about a mile down the road from the Cub Lake trailhead, by way of the Pool. They insisted that we absolutely had to see Bear Lake, so once we were back again, we redrove the Bear Lake Road. By now, 4 p.m., the parking lot was no
longer full. We were above 9200 feet, so the hike up to Emerald Lake, steeper and higher than the Cub Lake hike, might have been too strenuous to be any fun. Instead, we took the short, easy, wheelchair accessible walk around Bear Lake, which was indeed beautiful, the mountains hovering over it. 
Then it was time to leave Rocky Mountain National Park, taking the longer Peak-to-Peak Scenic Byway route. Mary Joy was soon worrying that this route might not have been a good idea. By the time we got to the town of Nederland, at 6:30, the sun was setting, so we had to take the seventeen miles on highway 119 to Boulder in the dark. In these seventeen miles you drop nearly 3,000 feet, following Boulder Creek in its twists and turns down the deep, spectacular Boulder Canyon.
But we came out safely onto Canyon Boulevard in Boulder. Dinner was at Aji, an eclectic Latin American restaurant on Pearl Street, a block off the pedestrian area. Not horrible, but some odd combinations of odd ingredients—too many flavors at once. I had pork loin in a sort of chile sauce, on a bed of little potatoes smothered in a three-cheese sauce.
Then we went to the 9 p.m. candlelight mass at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center church, just off the University of Colorado campus. We arrived a little late, especially because we couldn’t figure out how to turn off the lights on our rental car. (A pet peeve: that rental cars do not generally come equipped with the owner’s manual.) The music was beautiful, a combination of Gregorian chant, polyphony and some similar-sounding new music. Parts of the mass were said or sung in Latin. The small church was crowded with students, in the dark, amid flickering candles. We both liked it better than the mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus the day before, but I really don’t know that re-latinizing the mass is a very good idea. If you don’t understand what is being said or sung, then it’s not worth much. And if you do understand it, then why go to the trouble of saying or singing it in a language other than English?
And so to bed, around midnight, after a very long, very eventful day.
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