Rocky Mountains - Ute Trail

I took the advice of Bob, Co-Director at Shadowcliff, and decided to walk a 4 mile stretch of the Ute Trail. I also heeded the description in the park information handout: “Tremendous, open vistas above treeline; start and finish early before lightning and thunderstorms!”

Unfortunately, I ended up chatting with yet another interesting Shadowcliff character over breakfast and started out rather later than I had intended. Consequently I decided to take another piece of Bob’s advice, which was to park my car at the Alpine Visitor’s Centre trailhead, walk down the Ute Trail to Milner Pass and then hitch a ride back up to the Cream Puff.

Two trails lead away from the Visitor’s Centre at opposite ends of the car park. The Ute Trail leads away across the ridge and, eventually, down to Milner Pass. The other trail leads up to the top of a nearby peak to admire panoramic views of the park. It’s not a long trail, but it’s very steep and high altitude (although not quite as high as my most elevated restroom visit).


The views were absolutely worth the effort, but it was surprisingly hard work to get up there with my feeble lowland lungs and sluggish red blood cells. Actually, I thought I was doing pretty well at first. I climbed up more than half way to the top before I had to pause and pretend to be interested in trapped snow pockets while I caught my breath. I was even slowly but steadily overtaking (passing) other visitors, even quite young and fit looking ones. My ego was just fine with that slightly desperate feeling when my back and chest muscles started rallying to help my diaphragm drag in oxygen. The crushing blow to my altitude attitude came when the two trail runners sprinted past me up the steep stairs. Suddenly I felt every bit the pathetic coastal flatlander that I always knew myself to be.

Then, something scary but cool happened. The two trail runners reached the next landing and stopped running. They immediately doubled over, propped their hands on their thighs and tried to suck oxygen down to the hairs on their toes. With every tortured breath they made a loud noise like an inward scream, a terrifying human version of the sound a harmonica makes when you suck air through it instead of blowing. A whole stairway full of tourists stopped and stared, appalled at the sight of these two men screeching away, while their ribcages contorted around the bellows in their chests.

Suddenly I felt a whole lot better. If I’d been willing to make a noise like that at the end of it I think I could have run up quite a few stairs myself. With my confidence restored I went back down the stairs and across the carpark to the Ute Trail.


The trail starts out running along the side of a fairly gentle tundra slope. Without trees to impede the view, it seems that the mountains go on forever.


I just love these little lakes of trapped ice-melt. I can’t even quite describe why. They just seem so improbable somehow, so out of place in the barren looking alpine tundra. Each one of them is like a runt duckling that gets lost and left behind when the rest of the flock fly south for the winter.


It’s somewhat out of character for me to get sentimental about a big puddle. Perhaps it was the beginnings of altitude sickness. Whatever the reason, I found this park more compelling than any others I have visited. The mountains and the lakes and the trees all spoke to me in a language that I could almost, but not quite, understand. It was a movement at the very edges of my awareness. I could almost remember a taste, or a sound, or a smell that I had long forgotten. The name was on the tip of my tongue, just out of reach, but its richness filled my senses. Oh dear, it’s John Denver again: “You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain.”

Actually, true to the prediction of the park information handout, it was beginning to look I might get to experience a walk in the rain very soon. Dark clouds slowly churned overhead, growing steadily more dense and turbulent.


The path led down into the sub-alpine forest and I felt the great expanse of the tundras vista contract to a more human scale. The trees reached out onto the trail, as if yearning for a high five.

Just as the first drops of rain started to fall, I popped back out of the woods at Milner Pass. A man and a teenage boy were there, just packing up their jeep after fishing in the lake. I went over and started a conversation with Jeep Guy and Son, who are lovely people and live fairly nearby in Colorado. They were happy to offer me a ride back to the Cream Puff, despite the fact that the jeep was only a two seater. Fortunately, Son and I are both small people and managed to squeeze into a single bucket seat with relative ease. They gave me some helpful tips on other nice things to see in the area and asked a number of questions about Australia, which they would like to visit someday. I promised that if they ever make it down under I’ll be glad to share a seat with them.