Estes Park, Gateway to the Rockies

Welcome to Estes Park, the town most people picture when they think of the front door of Rocky Mountain National Park. You are sitting at about seven thousand five hundred twenty two feet above sea level, in a broad glacial valley ringed by peaks, with the Big Thompson River running through the heart of downtown. If your ears are popping and the coffee tastes a little different, that is the altitude.

Estes Park is a small place. Only around six thousand people live here year round. But every summer that number swells past thirty thousand as visitors pour in, and the national park just up the road draws more than four million people a year.

Three of the park's four entrances open directly from this town, which is exactly why it calls itself the gateway to the Rockies. The valley takes its name from Joel Estes, a Missouri farmer and former forty niner who stumbled onto this lush basin on a hunting trip in eighteen fifty nine and moved his family here the following year. They were the first permanent settlers on record.

But it was a visiting newspaperman who gave the place its name. In eighteen sixty four, William Byers, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, was hosted by the Estes family, and when he got back to Denver he simply started calling the valley Estes Park. The name stuck, even though the Estes family gave up on the brutal winters and moved away by eighteen sixty six.

What came after is a story of big dreams and bigger characters. An Irish earl tried to fence the whole valley off as a private hunting ground. A steam car millionaire named Freelan Oscar Stanley built a grand white hotel on the hillside and helped turn Estes into a resort.

A self taught naturalist named Enos Mills spent years lobbying Congress until the mountains above became a national park in nineteen fifteen. And towering over all of it stands Longs Peak, the highest summit in the park, its flat top visible from almost everywhere in town. As you drive these streets, keep an eye on the lawns and golf courses.

In autumn, wild elk wander right into town to bugle and battle for mates. This is a place where the wilderness never really left. It simply learned to share.