When challenges compound: Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

Tough times parking the trailer at the trickiest site of the trip!

The drive out of the Bighorns in Wyoming, Highway 14, also known as the Bighorn Scenic Byway, definitely bears mention. If you only have one day to see the Bighorns, this route, ending (or beginning) in the town of Graybull (below the mesa-like mountain area) is a 60 mile feast for the senses. 

We packed up early and left in the morning, always the best time to view wildlife, and were headed down from the Bighorns with our next destination, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, firmly in mind, and on the GPS.

A bittersweet feeling of future nostalgia filled me as we got on the road through those timeless meadows, sighting raptors and moose on our way out as well as a herd of cattle being driven by two cowboys on Appaloosas—I couldn’t get my camera out in time to capture them, alas, but that such things still exist fills me with a knife-sharp joy.

After leaving those rolling meadows I’ve come to love, the Byway switchbacks down into precipitous, brightly rocky Shell Canyon, which has …