Parked at Home 2025: Rocky Mountain National Park

On Thursday, March 13 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., I watched the first Parked at Home webinar of the 2025 season. This is the fourth year of Parked at Home hosted by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BLRV) and other sites in the National Park Service, along with the third year of summaries appearing on my blog. The presentations this year are interpreted into American Sign Language (ASL) by Sherrolyn King. The hour-long webinars will be uploaded to the BlackstoneNPS YouTube channel and available to view at any time. The first installment to this year’s series was Rocky Mountain National Park (ROMO) in Colorado and featured Darcy Lilla, a winter naturalist at Rocky Mountain Conservancy, the nonprofit partner to the park, along with a seasonal park ranger at ROMO.

BLRV ranger Mark Mello opened not with the singing of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” but a review of the history at Old Slater Mill in Pawtucket, RI. He noted that while park visitors take pictures of the same locations, each picture is unique and captures not just the landscape but the individual perspective. He also compared a pair of streets with the same name, Old Fall River Road. One is located in ROMO and contains scary-looking switchbacks up a mountain, while the other is in Dartmouth, MA where his grandmother had lived in an old farm house for “most of the ninety-nine years of her life”.

With that poignant connection established, the talk turned to Lilla, who used a fantastic green screen background. She briefly touched on the earliest human settlements in the area, beginning with the Clovis Paleo-Indians around 10,000 BC and the establishment of diverse Native American populations by 1200 AD, including Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Shoshone, and Ute people. Most of the history portion of the talk focused on the late 19^th through mid-20^th centuries. During this time, English settlers — both those who had English but were born in the United States and those who immigrated from England — arrived in Colorado to become miners, fur trappers, hunters, and dude ranch owners. Ambitious couple Abner and Mary Alberta Sprague started Sprague’s Ranch, later called Steed Ranch, in 1874. Unfortunately, this influx of people cause environmental destruction.

Many people collaborated to protect the area. At the national level, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir collaborated to start Estes Park Protective and Improvement Association in 1906. Local lobbyist Enos Mills worked to spread the word, and organizations like Denver Chamber of Commerce and Colorado Mountain Club supported the cause. On January 26, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Rocky Mountain National Park Act, making it the tenth park, and one of the few created before the Organic Act of 1916. During the 1930s as part of the New Deal, men in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built roads, trails, buildings, phone lines, and other amenities to encourage tourism to the area. These amenities were expanded upon and improved during Mission 66, a nation-wide parks improvement program which started during the mid-1950s. However, many structures have since been removed to restore the park to its natural state.

Today, the park can be enjoyed during any season, although the Alpine Visitor Center can only be reached between early July and early fall due to the fifteen to thirty feet of snowfall every winter season. The park uses fifteen-foot tall snow plows to remove the snow over a six week period before reopening. Additionally, the visitor center is located at an elevation of 11,796 feet, making it the highest in NPS. As for ecosystem statistics, the 415 square mile park includes alpine tundra, subalpine forest, montaine meadows made by glaciers, and watery riparian areas with 450 miles of rivers rivers, plus lakes and waterfalls. The park straddles the continental divide, so some rivers like Big Thompson flow east, while other rivers like Colorado flow west. Of course, the park has its share of animals, including marmots, bighorn sheep, black bears, moutnain lions, bobcats, beavers, deer, elk, moose, and pikas. Lilla’s description of a pika was especially cute, as they are “about the size of a baked potato with round ears, kind of like Mickey Mouse”, and they “build little haystacks in their den” to snack on throughout the winter.

The webinar wrapped up with a fun personal story plus an informative Q&A session. Lilla and her family had visited ROMO as a child, where she received her junior ranger badge and took a picture with a ranger. Many years later, when she was a ranger at the park, the now-retired older ranger visited, and they took another picture together. As for additional ROMO facts, the Alpine Visitor Center was designed with massive wooden beams on its roof to prevent collapse when snow buries the building during the winter. Some animals who visitors expect to see in the park no longer live there due to overhunting, including bison, grizzly bears, and wolves. The state of Colorado has released wolves with radio collars into the wild, and these packs are moving closer to the park. Meanwhile, moose may not be native to the area, as they were introduced in the 1970s as a hunting game species and currently have no native predators. Additionally, the park established an elk management program to prevent overgrazing. Fences have been installed around willow trees found in wetlands, as elk eat the baby willows before they can grow into the trees that beavers need.

As for vacationing at the park, hikers can enjoy over two hundred miles of trails ranging from under half a mile to ten miles round trip. Waterfall lovers can visit the Wild Basin Area, while horror fiction lovers can stay at Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO, where Steven King wrote The Shining. Finally, potential visitors must plan ahead by scheduling a timed entry reservation and preparing for all kinds of weather.