Best Easy Day Hikes Rocky Mountain National Park by Kent Dannen

Author:Kent Dannen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Falcon Guides
Published: 2020-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Hike

Rock Cut is the highest trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park and one of the busiest. Rock blasted from Rock Cut during road construction was used for road buttress across from the trailhead and also dumped nearby on the alpine tundra. The result is a natural-looking but unnaturally abundant accumulation of ideal rock habitat for cute, round-eared rabbit relatives called pika (see back cover). Take care when crossing the road and watch the pika from above along the retaining wall.

Thousands of people walking on embattled tundra plants would damage them significantly. Therefore, in this Tundra Protection Zone, stay on the paved trail.

The best diversity of tundra plants along the trail occurs at the trailhead, the most sheltered place for low-angle, tripod-using, wait-for-the-miserable-wind-to-quit photography of flowers. Typical of this area are some larger tundra species: purple fringe, sky pilot, bistort, and alpine sunflower.

For the first 0.25 mile, the edge of the asphalt is crowded by cushion plants pioneering the wind-scoured rock fields. Pink moss campion predominates, with white alpine sand-wort also heroically struggling to bring life to the barren domain of the bitter wind. Watch for patterns of tundra flowers growing amid lines of jagged rocks (felsenmeer) heaved together and thrust up by the freezing and thawing of the ground.

The progress of this effort can be judged a short way up the trail, where an abandoned road dating from the construction of Trail Ridge Road comes in from the left. Quarry rock was transported along this road in the early 1930s. Although the twin ruts of truck tires are still obvious in the shape of the ground, the cushion plants have made equally obvious progress in covering the surface.

The path’s beginning steepness distresses many motorists, who drive quickly and easily from oxygen-rich air at low altitude to thin air at high altitude and then attempt this hike. After the grade flattens, a spur path takes hikers to

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