Rocky Mountain National Park United States

Legendary

The Continental Divide runs directly through the center of this mountainous park.

Photo by Amy Aletheia Cahill

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Drop a cup of water on one side of a ridge in this park and it ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Drop it a few feet away on the other side and it flows to the Atlantic.

That ridge is the Continental Divide, the line running down the spine of North America that decides where every river goes. It cuts straight through the middle of the park.

On the western side, the Colorado River begins. The river that carved the Grand Canyon starts here as a shallow stream near Grand Lake, small enough to step across.

The park sits in north-central Colorado, about 70 miles from Denver. It holds 60 peaks over 12,000 feet, topped by Longs Peak at 14,259 feet.

A man named Enos Mills is the reason it exists. He moved to the Estes Park area as a 14-year-old in 1884, bought a small inn at the base of Longs Peak, and spent years guiding visitors up the mountain.

Mills started pushing for a national park in 1909. He gave lectures across the country, wrote thousands of letters, and argued with mining and logging companies that wanted the land.

He won, mostly. The park was smaller than he wanted, but on January 26, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Rocky Mountain National Park Act.

Newspapers called Mills the father of the park. He died in 1922, and one of the park's glaciers is named for him.

In the 1930s, workers built Trail Ridge Road over the mountains. It climbs to 12,183 feet, the highest continuously paved road in the United States, and about 11 miles of it run above the tree line.

Up there, the ground is alpine tundra, the same kind of landscape found in the Arctic. Tiny flowers bloom for a few weeks each summer, and the wind never really stops.

Drive Trail Ridge Road and stop at the Alpine Visitor Center, the highest in the park system, then walk out onto the tundra on the paved trail. Visit Bear Lake early in the morning for a flat loop around the water with Hallett Peak reflected in it. In September, listen for the elk bugling at dusk in Moraine Park, when the males call across the meadows.