Iceberg Lake From Trail Ridge Road
Clatworthy photo.
AUTOMOBILE TRIPS
Denver Circle Trip
The Trail Ridge Road, which crosses the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park, offers a grand circuit of Colorado's beauties that forms one of the most attractive and impressive of the scenic automobile trips of our country.
The trip starts from Denver, crosses the Continental Divide at Milner Pass in Rocky Mountain National Park, reaches Grand Lake, crosses the Continental Divide again at Berthoud Pass, traverses the Denver Mountain Parks, and returns to Denver, having completed without any duplication 240 miles of comfortable travel through magnificent country, full of interest and variety; the trip can be made in 2 days or it can be prolonged to suit individual time and inclination. It combines in one trip half a dozen features, any one of which by itself would be worth the journey. The Rocky Mountain Parks Transportation Co. operates daily scheduled trips over this route during the summer season.
On leaving Denver the road leads out Federal Boulevard, crosses Westminster Heights, from which point there is an extensive view of the Great Plains to the east and a panorama of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains to the west, stretching out before the eye from Pikes Peak to Longs Peak, a rampart of mighty mountains, 125 miles from end to end. The road then passes through a farming section, where irrigation has turned what was once an arid plain into a richly productive district. Fields of deep green alfalfa alternate with the waving wheat, and in the fall of the year the harvesting and threshing add new life to the landscape. Next is the town of Lafayette, where coal mining is the principal industry, and then the road traverses a sugar-beet country. Colorado is the sugar bowl of the United States, and here is one of the regions where the beets are most successfully grown. At Longmont and Loveland are large factories, where sugar is extracted from the beets and refined for table use. At Loveland the road turns westward and soon plunges into the precipitous canyon of the Thompson River, where it follows the turns of the dashing stream, walled in by towering cliffs. Then comes the village of Estes Park at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park and half surrounded by it. From the green of the meadowland the eye follows the slope, up, up, up, over timbered hills and rocky cliffs, past timberline to the crest of the Continental Divide where snow lingers, and to Longs Peak.