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after Thomas Sierra and I finished hiking the amazing Lost Creek Andrew was able to make it into town we had a bigger Adventure in store but before that we had a bit of time for a smaller Excursion so we decided to head to Rocky Mountain National Park and find out how much we could see in just a day Rocky Mountain National Park today we're going to be starting on the left side of the park at a place called Bear Lake it's probably one of the most popular trails there so we're trying to get there a little early beat a little bit of the crowds and uh go up as high as we can before the snow makes us turn
around so out in the distance over there you see this big white building with Red Roofs that's the Stanley Hotel and that's where Stephen King stayed when he wrote The Shining it's supposed to be incredibly haunted and I've been inside a couple times it's really nice but if you've ever seen the movie The Shining the exterior is not that the exterior is actually in Oregon at the Timberline Lodge the opening shot with the car driving and everything that's actually in Glacier National Park that's going to the Sun Road but the inside is based on the Stanley Hotel and the story itself does kind of like take place Loosely in the Stanley
Hotel I forgot my sunglasses but luckily Thomas has the dictator sunglasses so you just came back from New York right yeah man existence is such a varied experience it was actually kind of cool while I was there which was nice but it's just like humid and grimy and dark and here it's like big and open and Sunny Fresh Air okay first stop is be Lake we got to take a quick shuttle to get there doesn't look too crowded how you feel I'm excited then you're like we don't have to so to give you some context we're at the parking ride here we're going to take the shuttle all the way to the end where Bear Lake is a lot of folks will also head up to dream lake or Emerald Lake which is deeper into the mountains I'd
like to go to Lake uh haaha but uh I don't know if we're going to have the equipment that we need but you can see just look at all the lakes that are around here this is a range here so every Canyon here is going to have its Home Lake in a way yeah was cozy okay so which is the first one that we're going to get to so we're going to pass by nymph Lake and uh then we'll be hitting dream Lake if we wanted to we could go a little higher to Emerald Lake I think we're going to skip that and try and do Lake haaha okay I've only been here once they say that there's still some snow up there but it might be pretty navigable so I think I'm mostly adjusted to the altitude at this point but Andrew are you struggling at all it's not bad at
all right now but I can definitely tell I'm like struggling more than I would be on a trail like this my Cals are already burning Andrew loves to show off those cabes okay so we're barely even on the trail right now this is nymph Lake it's so interesting to me because a month ago this whole thing was completely Frozen and still covered in snow and now it looks so Lush and green and vibrant like it's always like this something about Rocky Mountain National Park and just Colorado in general any sight worth seeing that's within a mile or two of a trail head it's going to be very busy and we can kind of see that there's a
lot of folks here the next L we're going to go to is probably going to be pretty busy too but if you can go a little further beyond that then you'll be a little bit more isolated there's some sort of wild Violet here it's a little white violet and these are edible but I won't eat them so what do you think Andrew I like it this is great I bet that would be some tasty water we going is this flowing out of dream Lake yeah it is snow oh it's good snowballs here want to get Thomas so in a minute I think we're
going to come back here and we're going to try and do Lake haaha depending on how much uh snow there as you can already see it's kind of blocked away but dream lake is this way okay let's go look at this sign here it feels like Zelda where like the you know the Gloom has fallen on stuff it's like just plot of snow covering everything it's funny cuz I've been in New York City the past week and so you still have that like surreal sense of scale where something's just unfathomably big but this is so open and beautiful okay we're going to skip Emerald Lake cuz it's like 7 miles up
and we're going to go back down and then a couple miles up to haaha that's where our Trails go this is not bad at all but I can definitely tell that I'm getting more winded than I would it's weird cuz it feels like an easy hike but you're just more winded than you are used to I've been here for about half a week now and I definitely feel way better than I did when I first got here when I first got here it was a struggle this is very beautiful and these paths are nice and uh accessible for lots of people you can get the experience
without too much difficulty okay we're at 10,995 FT elevation this is higher than Mount baly right now from where we were a year ago wow okay I feel less bad a lot of things like this are very deceptive because you start so high up like we drove so high up already we haven't really changed that much elevation woo we wow I love these parts of the trail so nyph Lake down there that's one the first one we passed by that's the first one we passed by right down there yeah and then that's be bare Lake to the left wow that is it's been a mile since I've seen a view like this that is the quintessential Western Mountain
View wow be confident So the plan this weekend is to Summit Long's Peak but we're really concerned about kind of the conditions of the snow on the back side of the mountain if you've seen our Mount Whitney video you know that we had to go over the Ridge and then hike behind the summit to get to the top of the summit and same thing for Long's Peak out there you've got a flat top which we're trying to get to but we've got all the snow that we've got to navigate around so folks who are summoning are saying that we need crampons helmet and ice axe and uh we're not quite sure if we want to go through the effort of all that just yet but it's good to actually see it in person so that you can make that
call we've seen varieties of this plant in lots of places that we've been from the Midwest even to Hawaii but this is a type of elder flower or Elder plant and you can see it's got these nice clumps of flowers and those are actually edible you could cook them up a lot of people like to fry them like fritters and eat them and then later on those will become berries that you can also eat so one of the giveaways is it has this classic compound leaf look where it's got these little leaflets branching off of a s a single stalk so lots of Elders have that same look to it
this isn't like haaha yet but this is kind of one of the offshoots of it last year I came here with a friend we came here and it looked like blue milk just like milky blue was so unique and it was caused by a rock slide up the mountain here but still got a little bit of that bluin but it looks more or less like water today it's probably a trick of the eye but these ranges look much more tangible now all of a sudden you know I don't think it is I feel like you just make a lot of progress really quickly yeah in mountains it's a lot more like Skyrim than I realized so we've hiked about 1.83 miles and already the crowds are pretty much
wow check out the color of this Lake it's like w Glacier blue Gatorade it's more see this is very no this is a Baja Blast Baja Blast is that getable though good question look on the way back yeah it's fine maybe get a little wet do you remember one of the very first Bear Grills videos that we saw was him parachuting into a lake just like this oh and then he goes up the mountain and like runs down this environment is exactly what inspired me to get Outdoors
I've definitely grown an appreciation for all sorts of Landscapes but it is really great every s often to come back to this Classic snowcat mountain landscape yeah one of the things that stands out to me is the amount of Boulders that are here and just these mountains just get thrown up into the air and all these rocks just Boulder on down and in fact the canyon over there that's called chaos Canyon so that was named after John chaos John I think it's time for a little breakfast little sad boy breakfast little chocolate chunk granola this hits the spot though what do you live for and just lying in the sun like a molting lizard man that does look really nice SPL out you should try it I'm going
to oh Thomas is in such a hurry the funniest part is Thomas literally just said we have all day I was thinking about this is the point of coming to places like this you can come back it's never too late I like being on my own Island over here there's less jackasses yeah there's one jackass inste of two okay yeah so we're going to take a different route back through Glacier Gorge I think we're going to see some uh waterfalls or something this is what Kadin was like the whole way yeah pretty
much Gorge 3.8 mil those are basically two that we've done so far so this should be no sweat guess the next stop is lock Mills Junction 1.7 it's all downhill too that's kind of a nice thing about the shuttles is that you can kind of just go wherever you want and know you can always get back to your car fairly easily so Andrew do you notice any Flora or fauna we've been going through an area full of conifers and these ones uh being spruce trees you can eat these little tender tips that are growing on them like uh right here actually usually these little tender growths are edible just to put in your mouth but you can also make tea out of these needles this just like a vegetable yeah basically and then
most of this ground cover is just a bunch of blueberri so I imagine this is an area highly traversed by uh Bears before and after hibernation well before this is a good example of how mushrooms can be really confusing cuz right now from this view it's got this just little ball shape so it kind of looks like a puff ball but there's also a lot of deadly poisonous mushrooms that are white and before they sprout into the full mushroom shape sometimes they also look like this puff ball shape so when you see this sometimes the best way to tell is to open it up and cut it in half and if you can see the beginnings of a stem and gills and a cap within that ball then you know it's probably something poisonous or something that's inedible
whereas if it's a puff ball it should just be a flat white surface all the way through down here we've got some white wild flowers growing called White Marsh maragold and you can see how they're growing in this wetter marier environment and actually over here there something that kind of looks like a bellwart of some sort it resembles a lot of plants I've seen in the east like prolate bellart or false Solomon Seal so I'm guessing it's somewhat related so to than it I it's kind of hard to tell but there's a mix of spruce trees and fur trees in this area the bark of a fur tree looks smoother in
appearance but sometimes you get these little bubbles on them which contain a bit of resin uh and the sap is really good for starting fires uh but it's also a medicinal thing where if you have a wound you can put that on top and it's almost like a wild version of like Neosporin oh man whoa where are we wow this is a beautiful site man it'd be fun to camp out here looks like the perfect swimming Lake yeah see all the way to the bottom you know I don't yeah it's not on the map so I wonder if this is like a what do you call a Vernal yeah something like that you know something because there's been so much snow maybe this is just kind of where the runoff is oh there's one on all Trails it's just not named no name Lake
I have not been to a place in Colorado yet that has missed every single place is amazing Andrew you've been to Colorado before yeah and I've been to environments like this but when I was in Colorado we explored more of the Southwest part so the more deserty stuff so we went to Great Sand Dunes and Mesa Verde so this is definitely new like a quarter of a mile that way you get a good view but it's my Glacier Andrew's Glacier what do you see there's a little stream up on the mountain there
I love big open Rocky places like this I think just in that like Adventure mindset it feels like a safe spot to hunker down and rest even if we're not actually doing that right now one other cool thing about this environment we're so used sandstone in the East but this is granite right solid Granite hey you can't take this for granted you can actually see some of the blueberry flowers blooming over here got a nice red tinge sometimes they're just white but eventually those will turn into nice blueberries so the full flower will turn into a blueberry or the flower
like has a blueberry that comes out of it yeah it has a little like ovary type thing that gets fertilized and then that swells into the fruit and the petals will fall off oh I think the uh remnants of The Petal become that you know little crown on the berry yeah so I think that Gorge we were hiking next to is Glacier Gorge up next is Alberta Falls you can definitely hear the falls in the distance and I see a Gorge right ahead wow and as soon as you walk away just maybe like 30 ft immediately the sound gets so much less it's like deafening right next to those waterfalls
okay so today we have hiked 3 hours and 43 minutes 5.05 miles and that I think was like a really good start yeah this has been a fantastic acclamation hike like there's a little bit of uphill but it's getting you used to the altitude but it's it's still pretty easy and enjoyable I want to kind of clarify we started at the top we took the bus at the top and we're walking downhill be a lot different of an experience if we started downhill worked our way up yeah but we still went uphill like 5 minutes all right it was a bad
kite you can feel the spray yeah I think this is the actual outb to Falls cuz much more populated and you can really feel that mist that's really nice yeah I wow maybe not the most impressive waterfall we've ever seen but definitely impressive like that's the type of thing that puts the fear of nature in you look at it you're like I don't know about this gives you that healthy respect of the elements yes guessing this is the proper Glacier Gorge must be stuff like this also makes me think that I really don't know how the world works at all like where is that water coming from and how come it doesn't run out oh my gosh perfect timing thank you thank yeah so I got some treats for us okay so first of all Seltzer I will take a szer
yeah dink next on the treats sandwich wa who what a fancy sandwich this is a fancy sandwi a little smed did you do this after I fell asleep or something I did this morning oh I got a sesame seed bun and everything dude this is um mine such a family vacation kind ofand oh man yeah look at this family vacation sandwich right here and then also we got some grapes healthy eating healthy living and then lastly we got some ooh gummies and some uh cakes with a little bit of turkey well done here on the side oh thank
you so Fall River Pass is actually closed which puts a damper on my original plan it's a one-way dirt road that takes you all the way up into those mountains there it's a lot of fun it takes about a couple hours to do but uh it must be too early in the season for us to be able to make it so we're going to try and find a parking spot at a really cool waterfall here and then we'll have to double back and then find and go the other way to the top of the mountains so even though the oneway road is closed the parking lot for the aluvial Falls is still open so you know if you're limited on time and you want to see something cool definitely worth checking this out it's even got almost
uh not quite paved but um an accessible path I should say so it looks like the dam broke here flooded all the way down this River a lake Estus so apparently this is an aluvial fan it's when a steep incline of water eventually reaches out into like a really flat wide area just bring a bunch of Pebbles and rocks and stuff and it looks like relief so because we're not able to take the one-way dirt road we're going to take the Ridge Road and you can see the cutout of the mountain over there that's zigzagging and switch backing behind
me yeah there is actually no guard Whale Rider this is one of those things that's it's technically not that dangerous if you just take your time but it feels pretty dangerous I actually came to a mountain Ridgetop and built a road that is something so unfathomable to my mind we are currently at 11,000 350 ft in counting I'm guessing we'll top out 12,000 any 14ers in the in our view right now L's Peak behind us the one with the tabletop Tundra protection Zone Y where right there below the road there's a couple standing over there but many of them are lying down standing up to the left I see some moving I see moving yep yeah man this pretty fun to drive up to
a Viewpoint like this don't really have to work for it you can just enjoy it they're so far away I could walk around you see the babies there little not to pull off I will go slow this landscape makes me want to go to Mongolia and drink fermented HSE milk and wrestle and eat oal is that you say AAL I think it's awful I don't know a you can see the road down there that was the one we were going to originally come up but it's closed are you cold it is a little colder now I've got like the full paraphernalia on and I'm freezing okay 12,080 FT elevation right now I don't think are we
going up there not that high but we're going to be a little higher than this I think all right last stop Visitor Center isn't that like the opposite of what is normal yeah for us at least like these family vacation style things do we want to get back home sooner or do we want to take the SC like a Scenic way I'd say let's go straight home if we go straight home uh we're going to go back the same way we just came so it's either backtrack or keep going yeah and take 70
back I'm done with keep all right good to see you Rocky Mountain National Park thank you for watching see you at the post meal the Post Drive meal oh dude wow and there was still like the entire outc Chee all right we also have Ryan and Shannon oh no I'm just putting you guys how was that pizza that was super good I loved it yeah thanks for driving us Thomas all right what' you get what'd you get I got the tin big Labowski which is like a medium Labowski it's an alcoholic ice cream apparently oh interesting yeah rum raisin is that what it tastes like rum sure oh yeah I guess if yeah I can see people liking that you can
see you don't know how good that feels man these may not be the most stylish but these dictator sunglasses are fantastic they protect your vision with an iron fist oops caught in the act checking my phone it was a likeke and you should feel bad that's going in the episode I just have to attack you I must have them
