This is the first view many visitors get of Rocky Mountain National Park, for the easiest way to get through Estes Park is to continue straight through on U.S. 34 to the Fall River Entrance. For 40 years there was discussion about a visitor center to contact these visitors -- many of whom drive straight through the Park and bypass Headquarters and the Moraine Park Museum -- but there was no place to put it without considerable damage to the natural scene. Only recently was the new spectacular Fall River Visitor Center completed just outside the Fall River Entrance. It was built under a new concept -- outside the boundary of the Park -- requiring special Congressional approval. It was constructed with funds and grants raised by the Rocky Mountain Nature Association on a site adjacent to a newly constructed private tourist center. It includes unusual exhibits, and is manned by the National Park Service. The Old Fall River Road -- the first road across the Continental Divide in the Park, opened in late 1920 -- runs up the north side of Horseshoe Park and continues up the Fall River Valley.
The view on the left is of Horseshoe Park in autumn, looking up the Fall River Valley to mountains Chapin (named after Frederick Chapin who visited here several summers in the 1880s and wrote one of the earliest books describing the area), Chiquita, Ypsilon (though in the backlighting one can hardly see the Y of snow which gives the mountain its name), and Fairchild. The next picture is of essentially the same view after a late spring snowfall.
This is a vew of Horseshoe Park from the Deer Mountain trail. We see the road along the right side of the meadow and the Fall River going up the left side of the meadow and then swinging over to the opposite side of the valley. At the upper end of the meadow, we see the light-colored boulders of the alluvial fan which was created in only a few hours when the Lawn Lake dam broke in July of 1982. Across the bottom of the picture is the glacial moraine which for a time impounded the Fall River, creating the lake bed which has now become Horseshoe Park.
After much argument about a trans-mountain highway and a winter of political "log-rolling", the decision was made to build the road up the Fall River Valley, and construction began along this section of the road in 1913. Despite much wishful thinking, the road was not completed until 1920. The stone walls along the road were so poorly constructed that they fell like the walls of Jericho with every summer rain. Each winter and spring, avalanches thundered down the slopes of Mt. Chapin -- and across the road. Opening the road for the tourist season was a spring nightmare for the Superintendent, an experience not unlike that of those with the courage to drive the road.
Soon after the completion of Trail Ridge Road in 1932, the Old Fall River Road became one-way up. Still a dirt road beyond Endovalley -- well sort of gravel -- one of the features of the road is Chasm Falls. It's close enough you could walk to it from Endovalley if you don't want to drive the entire road.
Now we are in Little Horseshoe Park, lying just south of Horseshoe Park and separated from it by a glacial moraine, barely visible on the far side of the meadow. The aspen frame a view of Mt. Chiquita (L) and Ypsilon, the Y of snow almost completely gone by this time of year. This meadow in the 1930s was the location of the first CCC camp west of the Mississippi River.