Return Trip: Rocky Mountain National Park

0:15Hi, I'm Ryan Davis. And I'm Kiernan Schmidt. And this is Out of Office, a travel podcast.

0:24Kiernan:This seat taken. Hey, Kiernan. Hey, Ryan. Oh, man, you must have a travel fever right now. You're so close. Oh, my gosh. It's just a matter of days from taking off on an epic adventure. So, you know, remind us of the itinerary. And you're going for like a really long time, right? Yeah. I'm going to Peru. Going to spend some time in Lima. Go up to Cusco. Go to the Sacred Valley. Go to Machu Picchu. um you know i've been reading a lot of incan history so i've got all these sort of sites in my in my head um not machu picchu because no one knows what that really is but other other places the the sort of winning theory is that that was like a summer retreat yes that seems to be like the winning theory i like the one that it's like it was built for uh you know them to run sort of the the war against the spanish but that seems to be discredited but it's more fun so i'll take that But it would be nice and cool up at the top of the mountains in a hot summer.

1:27It's true. But Cusco is at the top of the mountains. I mean, everything was at the top of the mountains. So like, did they need another thing, you know?

1:33Kiernan:So you're basically redoing my honeymoon. That's like, that was that sort of the inspiration for this trip? We're missing like a chunk of it where you all slept in the wilderness and stuff. That's true. Yeah. You're not doing the, like a trek. You're taking a train to Machu Picchu. Yes, we're taking the like the fancy train with all the glass and the nice meals. So and this is like a this is like a three week trip, right? Yeah, we'll be in Peru for a little over three weeks. Yeah. So you'll be you'll be working during the day, living like a local and then sites on a couple of days off in the weekends.

2:10Yeah, we're definitely taking off a full week, though. Sort of the whole Sacred Valley, you know, is is is a non-internet time.

2:18Kiernan:And what are we looking at? A coach flight? Is that actually just got upgraded this morning, Karen? Funny that you funny that you mentioned it. Now, what do you think was the source of that upgrading? Do you have some sort of status? Do they know you as a travel influencer? Well, I would like to think that was true. But in reality, they just sent an email a couple of days ago saying that I could make a bid on a on a first class seat. And I made the lowest possible bid it would allow me. So you didn't even go to a business class. You got first class. Yeah, yeah, I'm just, I'm just, I'm flying. You know, it's an overnight flight, so I was like, this seems worth it.

2:55You know. Wowee, that is really something. Yeah, yeah. But I'm telling you, it was cheap because I bid the cheapest possible. I didn't think I'd get it, frankly. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

3:07Kiernan:So it's exciting. And anything, can I ask, are you going to the restaurant meal in the Sacred Valley? The one that was like my top recommendation. Yes, yes. We have reservations there. We're doing the whole thing. We show up and they give us a tour for a couple hours. And then we have a two o 'clock. We have this epic meal. So I'm super excited about that. And Ryan, you do remember that you've got a souvenir quest that I'm putting you on. This was a wooden capybara that I did not buy that I've been thinking about for my bookshelf for years. and you are, you're actually my second friend to go to Lima since I went.

3:49Kiernan:Well, I have no excuse. I'm going to be in Lima. I'm going to be in Lima for so long. So I'm going to, by the time I leave, I'm going to know Lima as well as I know Brooklyn. So in preparation for you going, I had to dig like super deep in the internet to find these local toy makers who like crafted this thing. So I'm actually giving you like three, you know, if you see any of these, I want them. Yeah. So this will be good. We can do like a Orion's quest for Kiernan's perfect souvenir. I love that. And we can reference, of course, the three P's of what makes a great souvenir. I know you know them by heart, Ryan, right?

4:27Kiernan:Potency. Potency, right? How strong does it bring you back to the place that you visited? Is it highly potent? Portability. Portability, Right. You don't want it to be too large, a whole other carry on, especially when you're asking somebody to pick it up for you. You know, I don't want to inconvenience you, Ryan. And because it's you, I know the third P is price. Well, Ryan, you know, I'm I'm a responsible. Listen, we're not all flying first class to Peru like Ryan J. All right. Some of us count our pennies. We know the value of a dollar. And yeah, I think a reasonable price. But though, you know, this souvenir quest was actually prompted by the fact that I overstated price in my consideration of this souvenir.

5:10Kiernan:As it turned out, I really wanted it. Yeah, well, I mean, it must be expensive if you didn't just pick it up. No, I think it's like$70. It was like just enough that I was like, ah, do I really need this? And it turned out the answer was yes. And I've wasted many hours of my productive time. So I've spent more in essence than what will actually be the dollar amount. But the other thing I want you to look for, I'm going to send it to you. It's very cool. Maybe we throw a picture of this up on the Instagram. When I visit other countries, I really, really like to see what toys are available. Because I think it tells you something about the culture of like what they give their children to learn from.

5:49Kiernan:and one of the really cool toys in Machu Picchu, one of the really cool toys in Peru is at Machu Picchu, there's a wall that has three windows in it and they're known as the three windows. And you'll see them there and they're pretty interesting trapezoidal windows. And there's a lot of theories as to what this area was used for and why those windows were there. I like to think it was to look out at the beautiful scenery. and they actually have a toy little block set where kids can make the three windows in their own house. I really, really like that. So that's, yeah, I think it's really neat.

6:28Kiernan:That's cute. It's so much better than just buying like, you know, oh, here's like a replica of Machu Picchu. Yeah. It's like a Lego Machu Picchu. Exactly. And I'm a big Lego fan. Well, Ryan, while you're, while you're looking high flying overseas today, we are going to talk about national parks, you know, national parks, of course, great passion of flying. One of my favorite things to talk about here on the show. And, you know, this summer, um, this summer of revenge travel, as we've been talking about on the podcast, lots and lots of people are looking for ways to get out, but there's some trepidation about going overseas because, you know, we're still seeing COVID surges.

7:06Kiernan:We're still seeing the rules kind of change. And there's the fear, you know, what if I get COVID overseas? Am I allowed back in the U.S.? So it's difficult, especially if you're trying to travel with a family. But national parks keep you in the United States and they are, you know, trips of a lifetime in themselves. And so over this summer, we're going to be doing some spotlight episodes on national parks. And today we're talking about one of my very favorites. It's called Rocky Mountain National Park. Are you familiar with the Rocky Mountains, Ryan? Rocky Mountain High, Colorado. As I read. Now, have you spent time in Colorado?

7:42I have been to Denver twice, but I haven't really explored Colorado outside of that. But Denver's gorgeous.

7:48Kiernan:This is going to be a great episode to whet your appetite then. I'm actually really surprised by that. There's tons of great sites all around Colorado. And I'll talk about that because we saw Rocky Mountain within the broader context of a Colorado road trip. Cool. That's fun. Well, before we take off, just want to remind folks to rate and review us on Apple podcast, getting a lot of play there. Thanks to the feature from Apple. But we also put our entire catalog up on YouTube. So if folks want to have a weirder experience and sit and watch us on YouTube, that is now available to them. So check us out.

8:27Kiernan:I mean, YouTube has become one of the number one, two, three listening platforms. People, you know, aren't necessarily watching, but it's where you can just kind of have it on in the background and stream. Yeah. Yeah. So we are now available for you to just fall asleep to on YouTube. And yeah, we've got 120 episodes there for your enjoyment. Go check it out. And, you know, there is no video component, just so people know. A lot of podcasters start putting videos on themselves. I got to say, I don't really see what the appeal of looking at us would be. No, I think that most folks don't want to see us at 8 a.m.

9:04Kiernan:Well, Ryan, thank you for saying that. Thank you for everyone who's reviewing. We read all the reviews. Ryan and I happily tweeted each other or happily text each other whenever a new one gets posted. And, you know, we just ask if you could make them positive and make them five stars. Really helps us build the audience. And as Ryan said, getting featured on that Apple homepage and the travel section really helps boost us. So we know there's lots of new people in the tent. So if you're enjoying it, please just let us know. But, you know, we don't get on here to ask you to review. We get on here to talk about travel.

9:35Kiernan:So, Ryan, I want to take us out to the Rocky Mountains. It's time to take off. Tell the cabin crew. Flight attendants, prepare for takeoff, please. All right, Ryan. So now when you've been to Denver, was that for work reasons? I think I was there once for work and once to see a friend in a musical at one of the stages there. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Denver's a great city and we should do a Denver episode for sure. And Colorado, I have to admit as a state, it used to really intimidate me before I had visited. I mostly knew it as the place that my wife grew up going with her family to ski in the winters and skiing very intimidating for me.

10:22Kiernan:And, uh, you know, now, now I've been skiing for six or seven years and I'm actually like pretty good. And I really, really, I've gone out to Colorado several times. We go to Copper Mountain is kind of the standard family mountain that they go to. I've also spent some time at Beaver Creek. And, you know, just by virtue of going out to these ski areas, you come into Denver, like to add a day or two, maybe work remotely from there and get to try out some great restaurants. But in addition to the ski recreation, Colorado is wonderful for its national parks. So a few years back, Catherine and I did a road trip where we hit three of the four Colorado national parks.

11:03Kiernan:So today we're going to talk about Rocky Mountain, but there's also - That is a lot of national parking. Well, it's a very big state with a lot of wonderful nature. Let me recommend, if you have anybody in your life who lives in Colorado, follow them on Instagram. Because I have several friends. In fact, my roommate from New York relocated to Aspen. Oh, my God. All she does is post like, oh, got in a quick morning ski in the mountains before work. And it's like these incredible views. These are just her normal life. Yeah, no, that's pretty fantastic. So, you know, if you're not a skier, you might find Colorado intimidating like I did.

11:44Kiernan:One, don't be afraid to pick up skiing. In fact, ski travel, I think, should be a totally separate topic we talk about because I have lots of strong feelings on that. Um, but Colorado can be a great place to plan one of these national park road trips. We, we visited Rocky mountain, uh, Mesa Verde. It's especially important to me because, uh, Theodore Roosevelt set aside Mesa Verde, but it's also unique among national parks for being a national park that protects, uh, cultural artifacts, which are these amazing, uh, native American cliff dwellings that are built into the cliffs at Mesa Verde. Oh, and Ryan, we also went to one of the strangest national parks there is, which is called the Great Sand Dunes National Park, which is really this almost desert landscape.

12:30Kiernan:And when you're there, really unique thing you can do is you can go sandboarding, like snowboarding, but you get a little sled and you sled. Oh, you talked about this before. I'm obsessed with this. I want to go sandboarding. It's a great one. And then we wrapped up with a big chunk of time at Rocky Mountain National Park because those other two, you can really cover most of the great things in a day or two. In fact, great sand dunes you can really cover in half a day. But Rocky Mountain National Park is so extensive that you it's one of these big, big parks that you can you could spend a week in easily.

13:07Kiernan:It's about an hour and a half from Denver. So if you know if you're flying in from from the East Coast, you got to build in that travel time. But it's extremely accessible. I mean, an hour and a half to be in such majestic nature is pretty great. I've often thought about how nice it would be to live in Denver and escape for the weekend out to Rocky Mountain National Park. And just to give you a sense of the scale of it, it's 415 square miles. And I almost think like that understates how big it is because so much of that square footage is vertical because it is just a set of enormous, beautiful, you know, pretty rocky mountains.

13:49Kiernan:You know, I think the branding is strong. Yeah, no, the Rocky Mountains have a good brand, most definitely. Oh, you know, it's right there in the name. You know what you're getting, getting some Rocky Mountains. And it's really, I would say the word Alpine comes to mind because you get all of this sort of lush, verdant lake ecosystems in the valleys between the mountains. And that's where some of the great hikes can be to take you through these gorgeous glacial lakes. And then you get these beautiful forests as you head up the mountain, a lot of ponderosa and aspens. And then when you get above, you get that windswept, really brutal mountain climber kind of aesthetic.

14:38Kiernan:And of course, you get the gorgeous views all around the whole park. And like many of the great national parks, they have gone out of their way to build the infrastructure so that each of these different types of settings is available to you. Even if you're not, you know, a big hiker, you can't do a 20 mile hike. You can still experience all of these ecosystems, all these great views because the government has built a fantastic drive straight through it with pull offs and viewpoints that you can make. But really important to time your visit so that those things are open because it is Colorado and you can get a ton of snow for a lot of the year.

15:23Kiernan:So that's like a scenic drive in the national park. That's right. So the scenic drive, it's, you know, a lot of a lot of national parks have like just a handful of roads that go through them. They tend to have, you know, one big stretch and maybe one or two roads off of it. And that can get difficult with traffic during business busy times a year. And Rocky Mountain National Park is very popular. And I want to talk about that. Oh, gosh, this is a four hour scenic drive. Yeah, it's long. It's long. And so, you know, an example is at Glacier National Park, which we're also going to talk about on a future episode.

16:00Kiernan:There's what's called the going to the sun road. And that goes straight through the park. It brings you through all the mountains. And, you know, in these national parks, they're not letting you go 60. You know, you're not blowing through these places. the whole idea is to take half a day or a whole day and drive through. And there there's, it can be, uh, uh, fairly, uh, perilous driving. Uh, and if you're the driver, you're going to really glue your eyes to the road because they, they don't, um, they don't fear putting you right up against the edges of some pretty perilous places. And, uh, so the road in, in, uh, Rocky Mountain National Park is exactly one of these.

16:40Kiernan:It's called Trail Ridge Road. And Trail Ridge Road, it actually brings you up to 12 ,183 feet and across the Continental Divide, which of course is marked. So you can get a great picture up there. That is high. Did you experience any sort of altitude? This is one of the things that worries me about Cusco. Well, you know, you are heading to Peru. So I hope altitude doesn't hit you too hard. Yeah, no, I'm going to see my doctor tomorrow to get the pills just in case. Nice, nice. I, when Catherine and I stayed there, we actually stayed in one of those hotels that pumps in extra oxygen. Oh yeah. I saw that on the birthday special.

17:22Kiernan:Which is supposed to help you adjust. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It does bring you quite high. So the road brings you up to 12 ,000 feet. And actually Rocky Mountain National park is the national park with the highest elevation of all national parks. And so that gives you a sense. The rule of thumb is that basically a third of the park is above the tree line. So that just gives you a sense of the immensity of these mountains. And the highest peak is called Long's Peak at 14 ,259 feet. That is pretty high. And you'll be able to pick out Long's Peak. But the truth is there are 70 peaks that are all above 12 ,000 feet.

18:06Kiernan:So, you know, I think as Americans, maybe we romanticize, you know, the Swiss Alps. But the truth is you get out to Rocky Mountain National Park. I mean, we've got comparable mountains right here in the great United States. Yeah, gosh. And this takes now they recommend about a half a day for this drive. Is that what you all spent? Well, yes. So they recommend about half a day because the Trail Ridge Road is 48 miles. And, you know, again, the speed limit and with other people on the road, it's not like there's multi lanes here. So you get behind a slower driver who's really taking in the scenery.

18:45Kiernan:It takes many, many hours to cover the whole the whole space. And you probably shouldn't be leaning on your horn, you know. Oh, my God. The idea of honking in a national park like that, when you said that my chest literally tightened. No, I really like this quote from the director of the National Park Service in 1931. As the road was being constructed, he said his name is Horace Albright. Horace Albright said it is hard to describe what a sensation this new road is going to make. You will have the whole sweep of the Rockies before you in all directions. And that was the inspiration for it. It's what drove the difficult work of building a road like this through the mountains.

19:28Kiernan:And it delivers more than I can tell you. And they actually have a one visitor center that is at the very the heights of this road. It's called the Alpine Visitor Center. So you definitely want to make some time to go there, talk to some rangers. And that lets you break up this this quite long drive. Trail Ridge Road, it starts in the eastern side of the park with Estes Park, which is kind of the gateway city into Rocky Mountain National Park. And I'm going to tell you a few things you can do in Estes Park as well. And it brings you all the way over the mountains to the western side of the park where you end up at the kind of gateway community there called Grand Lake.

20:10Kiernan:And when Catherine and I went, we were there at the end of May. And I remember when I was booking thinking, oh, the end of May, you're like knocking on summer season, but you're just early enough that like schools aren't out. And so families won't be flooding the park. And it definitely worked for the second reason. It was not overrun with people and we were very comfortable. We could get parking, we could get in. That is going to be a concern for anyone going this summer. And we're going to come back to that in a minute. But when we hit the park, I was incredibly disappointed that at the end of May, the Trail Ridge Road was still closed because when you're going up that high, up to above 12 ,000 feet, I mean, it could be snow for a long time.

20:54Kiernan:Any time of year, any time of year. So they estimate that it's usually open late May to October, but there's updates constantly. And we got incredibly lucky where I was monitoring, you know, is this great historic drive going to open while we're there. And it opened, we dropped all our plans. We grabbed our rental car and we went straight for it. And in fact, we got all the way over to the, to the West side. We stopped for a little coffee in that community, got all the way back and they closed the road. It was open for like a space of eight, 10 hours. And we managed to see it. That is, that is some good luck.

21:32Kiernan:It was good luck. And what I thought was really good planning, but thank you, Ryan. I appreciate that. Um, And what was really cool was you got to see the huge machines that they use to clear off the snow at these heights. And these are like these massive trucks. I've got this picture of us beside a truck where the wheels of the snowplow are actually bigger than we are. And, you know, they've got these giant chains. And it just reminded me, like, how much work goes into keeping these amazing spaces open and accessible to all of us. God, you can imagine the work that went into building this in the 1930s.

22:10Kiernan:Yeah, well, I mean, that was the age where America was really investing in our parks, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, now you know what the continental divide is, right? I just want to be sure. Well, maybe I should just say in case anybody does. So, Ryan, it's basically where the mountains peak so high that water drifts on one side to the west and one side to the east. And this continental divide, it stretches all the way from Alaska down through South America. And where it's in the Rocky Mountains here in the U.S., it's in the Andes in Peru. So you may well be crossing the continental divide on your trip down there.

22:50Kiernan:That's exciting. I'll have to keep an eye out for the water, see if it changes direction anyway. I just think it's also just a fun badge of honor to have crossed the continental divide. Absolutely. So anyway, you know, what's really great about the Trail Ridge Road is you can you can enjoy it at your own pace. You can get in all the views and, you know, if you're physically challenged or you're only able to do some small hikes, the Trail Ridge Road is going to be a great use of your time to get to see the spectacular Rocky Mountains. Now, Ryan, I did mention this is quite a popular national park.

23:23Kiernan:In fact, it regularly is in the top five most visited national parks. You know, it's beat out by Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, but there's a community of locals who frequent it. And then people travel from all over the world to visit the Rocky Mountain National Park. And really, really importantly for this summer and probably for many summers in the future, they have introduced one of these timed entry permits. That was not the case when I visited. But from May 27th this year to October 10th, you have to have a timed entry permit in order to get in. And that means that you need either a permit that you got online or a reservation with a campsite inside or a horseback riding company or a tour group company.

24:10Kiernan:Plus, you have to have your park pass or an entrance fee. Um, and I think the most important thing, and it's not intuitive is that you cannot just show up at the park and get one of these entry permits. So don't think you're going to go to the ranger station and pick it up. You have to go to recreation.gov and book it beforehand. Recreation.gov is a pretty good site. So folks should check it out. It is pretty good for a government site. And I actually find the descriptions of all the national parks, like new systems to limit visitorship, to be very, very intuitive. So spend some time there. You know, the nightmare scenario would be getting there and not being able to get into the park.