IT’S THE TOP

An idle bull elk, knee-deep in a stream full of Rocky Mountain runoff, nibbles on reeds at a meadow’s edge and fixes me with a lazy gaze. Beyond him a dozen snowy peaks rise. And on either side of him, like human parentheses, two tourists crouch, each with camera leveled.

Conspicuous wildlife, conspicuous mountains, conspicuous tourists. So goes each summer in the dramatic patch of north-central Colorado known as Rocky Mountain National Park.

The park, formed in 1915 after a decade of lobbying by local photographer and naturalist Enos Mills, is about two hours’ drive from Denver. (It’s also seven miles west of the 10,600 acres charred by the Bobcat wildfire June 12 to 19, but rangers said last week that apart from a few 24-hour trail closures, park resources and services were unaffected by the fire.)

At 415 square miles, Rocky, as its neighbors know it, is much smaller than its siblings Yellowstone (nearly 12,000 square miles) and Yosemite (3,400 square miles). Unlike those parks, Rocky has no grand hotels within its boundaries, or even modest ones--only campsites. But its charms are plenty large, especially for families with children.

Before the arrival of land-grabbing white miners and settlers in the late 19th century, the area was territory of the Ute and Arapaho. These days its human population is dominated by about 3.4 million visitors a year, most of whom begin and end their adventures on Trail Ridge Road, the park’s main artery, usually open from Memorial Day through October, weather permitting.

Trail Ridge Road begins at the eastern entrance of the park, near the gateway town of Estes Park, then climbs over the Continental Divide at Milner Pass and emerges from the park’s southwestern corner at the village of Grand Lake.

Not only is Trail Ridge Road the only way for a car to pass through the park, but it’s also on every list of America’s most gorgeous drives. Ascending beyond the tree line into tundra, it rises to 12,183 feet, which, the park service says, makes it the highest continuously paved road in the world.

The park contains more than 70 mountains taller than 12,000 feet, including Longs Peak, which towers above the others at 14,255 feet and from which four climbers have fallen to their deaths since January 1999.

I arrived by rental car from Denver in early June and spent three days exploring the park and environs with my friend Doug. Then, after he headed off to a job in Denver, I spent a day and a half hiking solo.

We chose more subtle challenges than Longs Peak, which is another way of saying we recoiled in horror at the idea of a 12-hour, 16-mile trudge through darkness and thin air, gaining 4,700 vertical feet. Rangers say about 9,000 hikers reach the summit each year. The park doesn’t require permits from day hikers, but they’re urged to start up Longs Peak trail at 3 a.m. so they can be back below the tree line before any afternoon thunderstorms erupt. Also, until the summer sun thins the snow on top--usually about now--the route requires ice ax, crampons and experience in such conditions.

So instead of a proud summit moment to remember, I have the parenthetical elk. And the thickly forested slopes, the moonscape above the tree line, the pair of coyotes trotting through the meadow, the bighorn sheep standing as still as billboards by the roadside, the altitude headache that lingered for about 48 hours, the mule deer on the ridge, the wet pounding of Adams Falls near Grand Lake, and the dry wit of Tony Boulch, an off-duty nurse I passed on a footpath one day at 9,000 feet.

We had been chatting elsewhere on the trail. Suddenly he realized he was about to lead some students from his Illinois church group in the wrong direction.

“The hypoxic leading the hypoxic,” he said with a sigh.

No doubt about it, the air is thin. Until an afternoon thunderstorm rolls in, as they often do, the sun seems about 6 inches overhead, the sky too blue. (Forget to slather your ears with sun block, as I did one day, and that sun will seem even closer.)

In the rutting season of late September and early October in the Moraine and Horseshoe park areas, rangers say, it’s not unusual to see half a dozen bull elk bellowing and playing meadow politics while 300 females watch and wait. Except for moose, I saw every animal mentioned in this article within 48 hours of entering the park.

For many families, Rocky is an annual ritual. They reserve a park-adjacent cabin or hotel room sometimes as much as two years ahead of their visit, they stay off the much-traveled road to Bear Lake, and whether their kids are 5 or 15, they know they’ll never run out of hiking trails. The park has about 360 miles of them.

The downside? In July, August and September, the park’s peak visitation months, weekend vehicular traffic is heavy on the 82 miles of paved road, and pedestrian traffic is almost as clogged on some of the shortest, flattest hikes, especially those that begin at Bear Lake, Chief Ranger Joe Evans said.

If you visit in summer, Evans and veteran visitors counsel, avoid the weekends and do your driving early or late in the day. If you’re headed toward Bear Lake, consider using one of the park’s free shuttle buses. They carry 160,000 visitors a year along the five-mile route between the Glacier Basin campground, eight miles inside the park from the Estes Park side, and Bear Lake.

Also, it’s wise to make lodging reservations well ahead of time, unless you intend to camp. Even then, advance work wouldn’t hurt. Two of the park’s five campgrounds, Moraine Park and Glacier Basin, take advance reservations.

Most visitors stay in the 6,000 rooms offered in dozens of lodges, cabins, hotels and motels in and around Estes Park. Some bunk down at the park’s southwest end, in the Grand Lake area, as we did.

The largest collection of beds near the park is at a place called the Estes Park Center, YMCA of the Rockies. It’s an 860-acre site outside Estes Park with 200 cabins, 450 lodge rooms and a devoted following. Rates for rooms and cabins run $48 to $239 nightly. Information is available at (970) 586-3341, but by mid-June, an operator said, this summer was virtually sold out.

It’s a bit demoralizing to hear so much talk about traffic and human logistics in what is supposed to be a haven for nature. But the most popular national parks are popular for good reason, and Rocky is well endowed with neat stuff. The park’s 3.4 million visitors last year placed it in the company of such old favorites as Yellowstone (4.1 million) and Yosemite (3.6 million).

Doug and I started with an afternoon and evening in Estes Park, and we did it big: a corner room at the Stanley Hotel, the grandest lodging for miles around.

The Stanley opened in June 1909 after F.O. Stanley, the entrepreneur behind the Stanley Steamer automobile, found the area good for his health. By the early 1970s, the hotel had faded, and its lonely, expansive aspects--lots of long halls and oak stairs--inspired a writer-guest named Stephen King to make it the setting for a novel called “The Shining.” (It was not used for Stanley Kubrick’s film version of “The Shining,” which combined Oregon’s Timberline Lodge and a few other locations.)

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the hotel fell on even leaner times. A new owner arrived in the mid-’90s with millions for renovations. Now its white walls and red roof look brilliant against the blue sky, rooms are rented year-round, and the shop is well-stocked with “Shining” souvenirs. (Sorry, no axes.)

Our room was spacious and pleasant (except for the cramped bathroom), and my bacon-and-eggs breakfast was fine. But I submit that once the daytime highs approach 80 degrees and you start charging high-season rates (which the Stanley people had done), you ought to fill the swimming pool (which they hadn’t).

Still, it’s hard to fuss for long about absent amenities when sunny skies and Rocky Mountains are waiting just outside.

On the way to them, we took quick measure of Estes Park, which is the sort of town that happens when lots of tourists pass through a place. The year-round population is about 3,200, and it has all manner of family amusements, including a lake with boat rentals, an aerial tramway and a teddy bear store shaped like Noah’s Ark.

Elkhorn Avenue, the main drag, has every convenience needed to fuel a vacation, from sweets to T-shirts to toys to Western art.

The business that claimed our attention the longest was the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Co., a taxidermy shop on Moraine Avenue, where the extensive inventory would handily furnish my vegetarian wife’s worst nightmare, from the $75 fox pelts to the full-size stuffed lion at $17,000. After a long browse, we decided we liked the beasts better alive.

But then we hit the Baldpate Inn for dinner. The good news was that the place, set on a hillside several miles outside Estes Park, was full of rustic charm. It included upstairs lodge rooms and neighboring cabins.

The bad news came in the dining room when we asked the waitress for menus and she looked at us funny. Two guidebooks had praised the place, saying the soups and salads were especially good. What they didn’t say was that soups and salads, bread and pies are the entire menu. Doug looked at me, the professional tourist, as if I were a traffic cop who’d just orchestrated a 73-car pileup.

Too tired to hunt for another restaurant, we stayed and were underwhelmed by what we did have. There was no meat (unless you count bits of bacon), and there were no main dishes. In a moment of grave ecological incorrectness, I found myself wondering: Where’s a dead animal when you need one?

Once we ventured into the park, my appreciation for live animals returned. Also, my gratitude deepened for all the public works this nation accomplished during the Great Depression.

Trail Ridge Road, an epic project begun in 1929, reached Grand Lake in 1938. Although you can get from one end of the park to the other in two hours on a light traffic day, it’s wiser to allow four to six hours.

First, by car, we climbed through pine, spruce and fir. Then, on foot near Bear Lake, we scrambled to a ridge top to eat sack lunches and scrutinize the bones of an old elk skeleton. On foot again near Deer Ridge Junction, we saw elk.

We spent about seven hours covering the 48 miles of Trail Ridge Road. Emerging at Grand Lake, we checked in at the Rapids Lodge and downed hearty dinners (the barbecued pork combo for me) at the Sagebrush Barbecue & Grill. A great day.

For the next two days, we stayed in Grand Lake, making strategic strikes into the park for selected hikes and vistas.

The town amounts to a three-block business district, a gorgeous lake flanked by vacation homes, and scores of cabins and lodges tucked into the surrounding woods. At the Rapids Lodge, a block from the town’s main drag, we sampled a $150-a-night condo, enjoying a bedroom each and a full kitchen. After Doug’s departure, I moved to a pleasant but somewhat stuffy $65 room upstairs in the lodge’s main building.

The Rapids Lodge suited me fine, but after checking out lodges and hotels around town, I decided that next time, I’d also call the Lemmon Lodge, a neighboring property (open seasonally) with an even better waterfront location and free-standing cabins rather than condo buildings. I was also intrigued by the Grand Lake Lodge, with unsurpassed hillside views of the lake and a wonderfully atmospheric restaurant and public areas. But its cabins looked as drab and spartan as its public rooms looked inviting.

Our top sightseeing priority went to two geographical milestones: the Continental Divide at Milner Pass (which could be any old mountaintop but for the park service sign indicating Pacific and Atlantic drainages) and the headwaters of the Colorado River.

The Colorado’s birth is a gradual, unpinpointed affair, occurring as mountain streams and other sources join in the Kawuneeche Valley, then empty into Grand Lake. From there, the river meanders 1,450 miles more until reaching a death as gradual as its birth, dwindling in the desert between Yuma, Ariz., and the Gulf of California. Skirting the water, we hiked a few miles up the valley on the flat Colorado River Trail, saw more elk and a couple of families picnicking at water’s edge, then doubled back.

“My favorite thing is looking across the water to that baldheaded mountain there,” said Aaron Hayes, 30, of Aurora, Colo., who was sharing a fishing rod with 7-year-old Aaron Jr. one morning at Point Park in Grand Lake. The elder Hayes has been coming to the lake for a decade.

The counterbalance to all that wilderness was the throbbing urban core of Grand Lake, whose main drag, Grand Avenue, claims no stoplights. The town counts fewer than 400 year-round residents but has 54 holes of miniature golf.

That’s not a slam. Grand Lake looked to me like mountain paradise for any kid under 12, and, consequently, for the parents of those kids too. Pedestrian boardwalks line the main street. In summer, the population swells to 3,000.

On my own for the last full day in Colorado, I hiked up the East Inlet Trail near Grand Lake, which meant about four miles of gradually climbing trail, headed toward Lone Pine Lake. As I progressed, the view of Grand Lake widened and deepened behind me, and I saw fewer and fewer fellow hikers. My original plan was to reach the lake, but the sky began to cloud up, and I decided not to risk a soaking or a lightning strike.

Through the pine forest, along the rock ledges, beside the rushing stream, I retraced my route in silence. For the moment, I had neither brilliant blue sky nor booming thunder to make me feel small. But even with its elk offstage and its grandeur muted, Rocky Mountain National Park seemed dramatic enough. It was a fine walk back.

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GUIDEBOOK

Relaxing in the Rocky Mountains

Getting there: United and Frontier airlines offer nonstop flights from LAX to Denver. On both carriers, restricted round-trip tickets begin at $378. From Denver, it’s a two-hour drive to Estes Park via U.S. 36, or a three-hour journey to Grand Lake via Interstate 70, U.S. 40 and U.S. 34.

Where to stay: In Grand Lake, the Rapids Lodge & Restaurant, 209 Rapids Lane, telephone (970)627-3707, Internet https://www.rapidslodge.com. Six lodge rooms, three rustic cabins and two modern condo buildings with 11 units combined. $65-$175 per night. Closed in November.

Lemmon Lodge, 1224 Lake Ave., tel. (970) 627-3314 in summer, (970) 725-3511 in winter, Internet https://www.lemmonlodge.com. Twenty cabins (19 have kitchens) on five lakeside acres, about 20 yards from main drag of Grand Lake. Cabins sleep two to 12. Most cabins cost $70-$215 nightly in summer, with minimum stays of three to four nights. Open May 19 to late September.

Grand Lake Lodge, 15500 U.S. 34, tel. (970) 627-3967, fax (970) 627-9495, lodge restaurant tel. (970) 627-3185, Internet https://www.grandlakelodge.com. Less than a mile south of the park entrance, 56 cabins and duplex cabins. Most units $70-$90, larger cabins $130-$160, with minimum stays of two to three nights. Open June 2-Sept. 10.

In Estes Park: Stanley Hotel, 333 Wonderview Ave., tel. (970) 586-3371, fax (970) 586-3673, Internet https://www.stanleyhotel.com. A 1909 Georgian building with 133 guest rooms. Rates $129-$269.

Baldpate Inn, 4900 S. Highway 7, tel. (970) 586-6151, Internet https://www.baldpateinn.com, about seven miles south of Estes Park. Open late May through September. Rooms with private bath cost $100, with shared bath $85; cabins cost $140.

Where to eat: In Grand Lake, EG’s Garden Grill, 1000 Grand Ave., local tel. 627-8404. Main dishes $7.50-$28.

In Estes Park, Notchtop Bakery & Cafe, 459 E. Wonderview, No. 4 (in the Upper Stanley Village mall), tel. 586-0272, offers meat and vegetarian options. Dinner courses $6.95-$12.95.

For more information: Rocky Mountain National Park, Estes Park, CO 80517; tel. (970) 586-1206, Internet https://www.nps.gov/romo.

Grand Lake Chamber of Commerce, 14700 U.S. 34, Grand Lake, CO 80447; tel. (800) 531-1019 or (970) 627-3402, fax (970) 627-8007, Internet https://www.grandlakechamber.com.

Estes Park Chamber Resort Assn., 500 Big Thompson Ave., Estes Park, CO 80517; tel. (800) 443-7837, fax (970) 586-6336, Internet https://www.estesparkresort.com.

Colorado Travel and Tourism Authority, 1127 Pennsylvania St., Denver, CO 80203; tel. (800) 265-6723 (COLORADO) or (303) 832-6171, Internet https://www.colorado.com.