AMERICAN ROCKIES
flexible models of today. These help to
open a side of the park not normally seen
by summer visitors. ‘One of the fun things
about snowshoeing is you can bushwhack,
go off trail, without causing damage to
vegetation,’ says Don.
He begins by leading his snowshoe party
across the safely frozen Bear Lake and then
uphill on a circular hike of a little over
a mile, past the equally snow-disguised
Nymph Lake. Cheeks redden: snowshoeing
raises the heart rate more than a regular trek,
and even accustomed hikers can find
themselves taking deeper breaths when
they’re almost 3,000 metres up. Yet for all
that, snowshoeing is a liberating mode of
transport, leading to moments of quiet
magic in the deep forest: a clearing where
a Steller’s jay darts across in a flash of blue,
or a boulder with a pillow of snow atop it,
standing over a spring that flows freely even
in the midst of winter.Don stops to describe the three strategies
all the park’s inhabitants must choose
between when winter comes: hibernate,
migrate or tolerate. While the yellow-bellied
marmot sleeps under the snow, lowering
its heart rate to five beats a minute, many of
the bigger four-footed creatures, including
moose, choose to move on. The park’s
two-dozen mountain lions follow. ‘It’s not
that a lion couldn’t make it up here: it’s got
big paws,’ says Don. ‘But where’s the food?’
The great tolerator of winter is the snowshoe
hare, whose outsize hind feet are as useful in
deep powder as the name suggests. Bobcats,
with smaller stomachs to fill than the
mountain lions, stick around.
Humans display the rarest behaviour of
all animal species: sometimes they choose
to migrate towards snow. While Rocky
Mountain National Park naturally lacks the
ski lifts and groomed pistes seen elsewhere
in Colorado, park rangers lead cross-countryskiing excursions along with the snowshoe
hikes. Winter’s arrival also means that
mountaineers in the park have a new focus
for their attentions: ice climbing on frozen
waterfalls. One of the most popular
locations, Hidden Falls in the otherwise
little-visited southeast corner of the park,
is an unremarkable trickle in summer, left
off most maps; in winter it is transformed
into an ice wall some eight storeys high,
usually with a climber or two affixed to it
by means of ice picks, crampons and rope.
Rocky Mountain National Park covers just
a tiny fraction of a range that stretches for
more than 2,000 miles, north into Canada
and south as far as New Mexico. And yet
Colorado is a fair location for a namesake
preserve: it’s the only US state to lie entirely
above 1,000 metres, and is also home to the
30 highest peaks in the whole mountain
chain. The national park has existed since
1915, but even before then sightseers andRoosevelt National Forest
borders Rocky Mountain
National Park to the east,
and is named after the famously
outdoors-loving US president
Theodore Roosevelt