I've been to mountains before, but Rocky Mountain National Park is different in a way that's hard to articulate until you're actually there. It isn't the highest peak I've ever seen, but it's the way the whole place tilts — everything is vertical, every vista has another layer of ridgeline behind it, and the sky at altitude has that particular quality of deep, saturated blue that you only get above 11,000 feet. I went in late May, when snow was still holding on the high passes and the lower meadows were just starting to green up.
The park sits in north-central Colorado, straddling the Continental Divide, and it contains some 415 square miles of Rockies terrain that ranges from ponderosa pine forests at lower elevations up through aspens and lodgepole pines, into subalpine meadows, and then finally to the exposed alpine tundra above treeline — a landscape that looks more like Iceland than Colorado. Trail Ridge Road, which runs across the park and peaks at 12,183 feet, is one of the highest continuous paved highways in North America, and driving it in late May felt like passing through several different ecosystems in the course of an hour.
The wildlife is what really got me. Elk are everywhere — genuinely everywhere, including standing in the middle of highways and wandering through the town of Estes Park at the park entrance. In the high meadows, you see them grazing in the morning light, unhurried and enormous. I also spotted a couple of mule deer and, near the tundra, the small round forms of pikas darting between rocks. The park is one of the better places in the country for seeing elk in their element.
Estes Park makes a comfortable base for visiting; it's right at the entrance and has plenty of lodging options. Most of the iconic hikes — Bear Lake, Emerald Lake, Dream Lake, Mills Lake — cluster around the Bear Lake corridor in the south part of the park, which means it gets crowded. The timed entry permit system handles summer crowds well. If you can manage a weekday visit, the difference in trail foot traffic is significant.