Rocky Mountain National Park (part 2)

After the lunch break, we continued on into the Rocky Mountain National Park itself, heading up above the tree line again.

When you see some of the roads that the coach driver needed to negotiate, you can see why you need the driver to have his full attention on the road and a separate guide to do all the talking to us all!

Narrow roads, hairpin bends, steep drops just off the tarmac, and the constant lookout for wildlife jumping into the way too.

Apparently, it's an early sign of altitude sickness if you start feeling nauseous - I'd have thought looking down as you go around the bends was more of the cause of any such feelings!

We stopped at some photo opportunities on our way up to the Alpine Visitor Centre.  It can get very windy up there - wind speeds of over 140mph have been recorded there, which is hurricane force.

All the logs on the roof of the visitor centre are not just a bold architectural statement, but rather more practical: they are there to keep the roof on when it gets windy!

Unfortunately, we only had half an hour here (it would have been better to have less time allocated for lunch and to spend that extra time here at the highest point).

Looking the opposite direction from the visitor centre, here's a picture of a path to the top, with a mixture of a tarmac path and steps, which seemed a bit wobbly to me.  It doesn't look very steep in the pictures here, but it is pretty steep.

Only a few of our group managed to make it all the way to the top, and it took them about 15 minutes, so they went up, took a few photos and had to come straight back down again.  I went up more slowly, as suggested, but stopped about three quarters of the way up, about where the group of people to the left of the person in light blue is, as it was nearly 15 minutes to there.

You can see some of the ice on the mountain top below, which has appeared in other pictures taken from a long way below.  Although they had the first snowfall at the top of the mountains in late August, this ice is still there from last winter.

There are lots of tall sticks stuck in the ground alongside the roads and around the buildings up here.  The winters are too severe to maintain access to these facilities and the roads during the worst of the winter, and the sticks serve as a guide when they come to re-open in the spring.

The first lot up the mountain are the road team that have to clear the snow from the road, and they rely on the sticks to know where exactly the road is.  Then the buildings are dug out, so that things can be re-opened as soon as possible.  Quite a long stretch of the road that we travelled along in the park will be closed next month until the spring.

To be continued ...