|
By Richard Martin, 7-12-06
Last year on the 4th of July we went up to the great lawn at Chautauqua to watch the fireworks at Folsom Field, and didn't actually see a thing. Along with the other 200 or so people who had the same idea, we discovered that you have to be higher up, above the trees, to be able to see the bombs bursting in air. Not wanting to make that mistake again, we decided to make this year's Independence Day an adventure: we headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park for a hike and then came down into Estes Park to watch the fireworks over Lake Estes.
Since this involved hiking with our six-year-old, it involved a certain amount of risk.
Walker is already a seasoned camper and outdoorskid, and, at almost four-and-a-half feet with long legs and his old man's quarter-miler's stride, a champion walker. However, he's just six, and this summer he's been going through an "I don't wanna do that" phase that makes plans of any kind – going to the museum, doing a sleepover, attending a basketball clinic – hit-or-miss affairs. And any parent of a six-year-old will know that attempting a real hike in real wilderness with your child, no matter how well-prepared you think you are, is always chancy. It could be wonderful; it could be miserable; either way it'll be memorable.
As it turned out, our hike to Mills Lake was wonderful, one of my favorite hikes in Colorado to date, with or without kids.
Mills Lake lies in the southeastern part of the park, in the shadow of Long's Peak. Reached from a parking lot near the Bear Lake trailhead, the trail is one of the most popular in RMNP – but most hikers go only as far as Alberta Falls, a picturesque cascade just .6 of a mile up the trail.
As it turns out, about another half-a-mile up, there's an even more dramatic, unnamed fall, which plunges through a narrow crevasse that you have to walk out onto overhanging ledges to see. Once we passed that spot we saw only a few more hikers the whole afternoon.
All of the guides to hiking with kids say, "Go their pace." I don't buy it. Walker's pace alternates between bursts of speed and total dawdling that would keep us from getting much of anywhere before dark. My method is to indulge his frequent stops but to urge him gently on, like a sheepherder with a herd of one. Letting him know, often, that we can stop here on the way back down is a good way to keep him from spending 10 minutes over every toadstool and retriever track. The capacity for wonderment is a great thing, but it's my job to guide his sense of awe to the really spectacular sights of the Rockies – to direct his viewpoint upward from the molehills to the mountains, as it were.
Winding through groves of spindly aspens and on up to thickets of limber pine, the trail gradually afforded views north, to the Mummy Range, and east to the Lake Estes valley. We passed under the northernmost of the Glacier Knobs, a series of huge outcrops that line the eastern flank of Long's Peak like fenceposts. Then, clearing the treeline, the trail took a sharp bend to the right (northwest, I think, but I wasn't carrying a topo map or a compass -- thus breaking one of the primary rules of dayhiking with kids) and we found ourselves in Glacier Gorge, for which the trail is named.
No matter how many times I trek in the high country I am always startled and delighted at how your limited perspective can suddenly open up to vistas that you didn't expect, like stepping from the relatively closed-in trail as it followed Glacier Creek zigzagging up the mountainside into the barren splendor of the primordial V-shaped canyon, strewn with rubble on both steep sides. The evidence of the violence the ice did to this stretch of rock and brush was strong, like witnessing a slow-motion cataclysm. The trail dwindled to a barely discernible track across scree, and I mentioned to Walker that we were likely the first humans to see this place since the Ice Age – an illusion that lasted about 10 minutes, till we encountered a group of teens headed down at a rapid clip.
By this time we'd been climbing over an hour, and you might have expected the first whines to start escaping Walker's mouth, but he was as jazzed by the vistas and the sheer grandeur as we adults were, and as we neared our destination – Mills Lake, the first in a series of alpine lakes that dot the gorge – all three of us found new energy.
Named for Enos Mills, who lived in a nearby cabin for four decades and was the driving force in establishing Rocky Mountain National Park, Mills Lake is a real lake, not a tiny alpine tarn. The jagged bear's-teeth cliffs above it (poetically named "the Keyboard of the Winds"), the tangled underbrush on each side, the thunderclouds pouring over the ridge into the gorge, gave it a forbidding cast like a scene out of Norse legend. If a woman's arm had emerged from the steel-gray water, brandishing a shining sword, I wouldn't have been particularly surprised.
"I want to go farther," Walker kept saying. "Can't we keep going?"
But by now it was almost 5:30 and the clouds looked more and more threatening, and after just 10 minutes I said, "We should get out of here." This was our one miscalculation of the day: if you're going to ask a six-year-old to hike almost three miles, with 1000 feet of elevation gain, you need to give him at least an hour to rest and to frolic at lakeside.
We made it back down in a little over an hour, and the inevitable tired feet and whining ensued – from Walker as well as me – and Shawna, my wife, ended up carrying him piggyback for part of the last stretch. At the truck we all high-fived and shared an Izze soda, celebrating the longest hike of Walker's young life.
For some tips on hiking with kids, you can check Outdoors Places and Backpacking at: http://Backpacking.net/ Beyond sharing your own sense of wonder and being willing to be flexible, my own advice is pretty well limited to "Have a kid who loves to walk, has a sense of adventure plus plenty of stamina, and is not a complainer."
Oh yeah, the fireworks: we made it back down to Estes by 8:00, in time to have a truly execrable buffet dinner at the Silverthorne Lodge, and then watched the fireworks from the roof of our vehicle. They were perfectly satisfactory. We then spent an hour trying to get out of Estes on Highway 36. Next time I'll be sure to get a hotel room in town.
Like this story?
|