1991/10 Rocky Mountain trip - Flattop Mountain |
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The Saturday morning was absolutely gorgeous, definitely a Rocky Mountain High. John Denver was still alive back then.
I drove up towards Trail Ridge Road. I wasn’t all that surprised to find the road closed, as it goes up to over 12000 feet and isn’t ploughed in winter. 
The views from the road can be spectacular so I walked the road for a little while until the snow underfoot changed to ice and then I gave up. 
The road in the other direction up towards Bear Lake was still open so I headed there. In summer the parking lot fills early and then the only access is by shuttle bus, but there was no problem in October!
Bear Lake is an easy, flat walk, well worth it for the views of the surrounding mountains, but it is rather busy in the summer. The real gem of a trail though is the one that takes off from there and heads up past Nymph Lake and Dream Lake and ends aat Emerald Lake with its iconic view of Hallett Peak and Flattop Mountain. Sandie and I have hiked this a number of times, as long ago as 1978, and in the summer of 1991 we had walked around Emerald Lake while Sandie’s Mum looked after the kids. This time, all the lakes except Bear were frozen and the views just as beautiful in a monochromatic landscape.
I’d never had the time to climb either Hallett or Flattop, though I had been up on Longs Peak once, looking down on both of them. It has always seemed to me that Hallett, 
which looks like it has a flat top, should have the other name, but things probably look different up there. In a moment of insanity, I thought I’d see if I could make it up to Flattop in the snow. At first, things looked good and even though the trail was steep I had enough traction to stay on it. Part way up I met a Frenchman coming back down; he said that the trail was good though difficult in places. He was right and most of it was OK, but as I was walking across what looked like flat snow I suddenly dropped chin-deep into a hole in the snow. Climbing back out was tricky as I couldn’t see what I was climbing. I gave the trail one more try but fell in again, this time disappearing below the snow. I climbed out again, and concluded that I was probably walking across a field of gigantic boulders. I’d done this back in the summer, but in the winter I thought there was a chance that I might not be able to climb back out and would be there until the following summer. Reluctantly I gave up and made my way back down the mountain and the trail to Bear Lake and the motel.