My Goodness, My Guinness: Colorado Part 3: Rocky Mountain National Park!!

Day 5 (Wednesday, 9/7): You guys, Rocky Mountain National Park is AMAZING!!!! We absolutely loved it. There was so much to see and do, and our campsite was also amazing. When we arrived there on Wednesday morning, we were too early to go to our campsite so we decided to drive on Trail Ridge Road (awesome views the whole time!) to the Alpine Visitor Center to get situated. It also has the distinction of being the visitor center with the highest elevation in the nation! It is at 11,796 feet, and WOW do you feel it! We spent a bit of time at the visitor center and then we hiked a nearby trail to a tundra area! I was so excited to see the alpine tundra, and it was even cooler than I had expected. These delicate little plants (you can't step on them or you'd kill them!) are the only thing that can grow at that high elevation. There are absolutely no trees, and when we hiked to a nice viewpoint we could look down at lower elevations and see right where the treeline was in the park, and that's the highest elevation that trees were capable of growing! The tundra area was really cool, and hiking was HARD due to the elevation! You can also see in the pictures that there were bits of snow on some of the mountains!

That sign says elevation 12,005 feet!! There's the tundra!

There's some snow!

I tried to get an up-close picture of the tundra so you could see the tiny plants!

Here's the Alpine Visitor Center!

After hiking through the tundra, we continued driving on Trail Ridge Road until we got to the Continental Divide! This is the hydrological dividing line where water on one side drains into the Atlantic Ocean and water on the other side drains to the Pacific Ocean. Pretty cool! After this stop, we continued driving around and enjoying all of the crazy views! We stopped at a lot of viewpoints along the way to enjoy the scenery.

It was just a little bit windy! Haha!

My handsome husband!

After lots of driving around looking at amazing things and doing a few small hikes, we drove to our campsite! It was awesome, and the views were incredible. We also had total privacy from any neighbors! It was so relaxing and peaceful. Oh, another INCREDIBLE thing that I'd been really excited about was the elk!! They are far cooler than I'd even imagined (pictures will be in the next post), and their calls sound amazing. We could hear them calling to each other while we were going to sleep that night! SO cool.

This is the view from our campsite! Not too shabby, eh?

We both spent a LOT of time relaxing in this hammock just enjoying the view (and some beers). It's so darn comfortable, and it has these elastic bands that go around the trees that make sure there's absolutely no harm/damage to the trees. Plus, it packs up into a teeny tiny little bag so it's super handy for travel!

There's our little tent and our amazing view of the Rocky Mountains!

Day 6 (Thursday 9/8): We woke up bright and early and got an early start on hiking! We hiked to some lakes on this day. The main lakes were Emerald Lake and Bear Lake, but on the way to Emerald Lake we also saw Nymph Lake and Dream Lake. We had an amazing day, and I'll just post a bunch of pictures! We didn't hear any elk that night because turns out there were coyotes in our campground so the elk stayed far away.