It’s late spring in Rocky but you can really feel summer is just around the corner here in Rocky Mountain National Park. After what has been a cool wet spring, the warm weather has arrived on the Front Range of Colorado. Lots of thawing, melting snow and greening grass are the themes right now in the park,
Thursday morning looked promising for a colorful sunrise. After checking all my usual weather apps, Clear Dark Sky, Sunset WX, Underground, I figured I would hike up to Cub Lake for sunrise. The pond-lilies should be sprouting on the surface of the lake and the grasses around Cub Lake should be looking their spring best.
I get a chuckle when I go through my past photo catalogs. One theme I notice is that I end up at many of the same locations around the same time year after year. I don’t do this on purpose but the light and conditions often dictate where I end up. Cub Lake is one of those locations that is a great place to photograph early in the season. The lake thaws out much earlier than many of the other lakes as it resides at a much lower elevation. The trail to Cub Lake also is snow free much earlier than the Bear Lake and Wild Basin trailheads do. The other great thing about this trail is wildflowers start blowing here earlier than most places in the park and it’s a great place to see and photograph wildlife early in the seasons. Moose, elk and birds are all abundant along the Cub Lake trail in late spring.
So after leaving the Cub Lake trailhead at about 4:30 AM, I arrived at Cub Lake to find conditions more or less like I would expect. There was a modest breeze which is always tricky for photographers shooting RMNP. The breeze would alternate from calm, to gusty which of course muddles the lakes surface and can make catching a reflection in the surface tricky. Clouds were floating over Stones Peak and we had enough breaks with the wind that the overall prospects for sunrise looked decent.
Sunrise at Cub was beautiful as always. Pastels turned into orange and reds and the wind remained modest. I shot sunrise and then headed west past cub lake to connect with the Fern Lake trailhead and loop back to the parking lot. I love hiking this loop as its both beautiful and a great way to get my legs back in shape for ‘hiking season’ in the park. No matter how much training I do all year, nothing gets you in better trail shape than just hiking miles with a heavy pack on.
Past Cub Lake, and down to Big Pool. The wildflowers are amazing right now along the trail. The Golden Banner is having a banner year, wild roses and a few columbines were all present. The Big Thompson was running at a good clip with the snowmelt of the spring runoff. After photographing the Big Pool for awhile, I headed back to the parking and ran into a Bull Moose right on the trail. Moose number 2, per his tag was enjoying the verdant green aspen trees right along the trail. It’s been awhile since I’ve actually stopped to photograph at the Big Pool but it’s amazing how time can renew interest in photographing any given subject or location that you’ve shot a hundred times before.
I finished up my loop hike, got back to my car and just soaked in all or Rocky’s spring goodness. Its a great time to photograph RMNP right now. Wildflowers are blooming, elk and moose have their newborns, many lakes are now thawed and lower elevation trails are free of snow and great for hiking. Give it another few weeks and the alpine tundra will be greening up and at its prime. It still amazes me to this day, just how short and fast the seasons progress in Rocky. Blink and you might miss it!.