Bear Lake RMNP to Grand Lake, CO Hike

Seth and I had been talking about hiking from Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park, CO to the town of Grand Lake, CO for a while. When his parents came to visit a couple of weeks ago, we suckered them into watching the boys and also picking us up on the other side.

Our original plan was to split the hike into two days as the distance is 18.1 miles. I had been scouring blogs and Google looking for other people who had made the hike and trying to get a feel for how long it would take. Most people do this hike as a day hike in 8-10 hours, but I knew we would be a lot slower with backpacks since we wanted to camp along the way and would need to carry sleeping bags, and more supplies than if we were to simply do a day hike.

We actually ended up hiking 5.7 miles the first day and 19 miles the second for a total of 24.7 miles. What happened was a combination of stupidity, laziness, and our excitement to get our hike started.

As I was saying, we wanted to split the hike into two days so we left on a Saturday. Our original plan was to leave our car in Grand Lake at the North Inlet Trail and have Seth’s parents drop us off at the Bear Lake trailhead. Our Saturday start got pushed back so far that we decided to drive ourselves to Bear Lake and have Dale and Collette pick us up on Sunday night in Grand Lake. By the time we got to the backcountry office in Rocky Mountain National Park, it was 1:30.

There was no way that we could get across Flattop mountain at such a late time and it was raining sporadically so the threat of being struck by lightening while crossing the mountain was not something we wanted to take a gamble on anyway. The ranger we talked to said that  the closest campsite that he could get us to was a site called Sourdough that would end up making our hike 19 miles the next day. “No biggie” we said and agreed to take it.

What we should have said was “No thanks”, waited until the next day, and made our trip a day hike. But, as I alluded to earlier, we were so excited to begin that we couldn’t stand the thought of waiting a minute longer, so off we went.

It was raining when we started out from the parking lot at Bear Lake and then continued to rain sporadically as we hiked the 2.5 miles to our campsite.

We set up our tent and decided to hike an additional 1.6 miles to Odessa Lake since it was still pretty early in the evening and the rain had stopped.

Seth brought his fly rod and caught a couple of cut throat trout while I watched, took pictures and worried that we would have to hike back in the dark.

Here’s a view of the lake right before we hiked back to camp for a total of 5.7 miles the first day.

As a side note, I am wearing the exact same socks and shoes in this picture that my dad bought for me 11 years ago. They are still holding up and not from lack of use. After 11 years and two kids, I think that my feet may have grown nearly half a size and the shoes did not fit so well by the end of the next day. That may have had something to do with the intensity of our hike though…

The next morning we got on the trail at 6:23 am and headed back toward the junction of the Flattop Mountain and Odessa Lake trails. When we reached the junction, we debated going all the way back to our car (less than a mile) to drop our packs, but here’s where the laziness kicked in, and we decided to keep going. We kicked ourselves for that one the rest of the day. It was totally pointless to carry those heavy backpacks across the continental divide when we could have gone a little bit out of our way to drop them off.

Here is Seth with a view toward the North not long after we passed the tree line on our way up Flattop.

We stopped near the top for lunch next to a hitch rack. A lot of people passed us; some on their way up and some on their way down. One couple in particular caught our attention. They were probably about 10 years younger than us. He with no shirt, a daypack, and hair down to his shoulders. She was wearing a sports bra, black capris, and holding an iPod. They turned at the hitch rack to take a detour that several people were taking and he was talking non stop as they passed us. He seemed to be a little over confident and we sort of looked at each other and laughed as they walked by. He was definitely trying his best to impress her.

That’s the view from the top of Flattop with Odessa Lake behind me in the picture.

After the steep, steep hike wearing our heavy, heavy backpacks, walking on a flat trail was pretty close to how I imagine heaven must be.

The trail split at the top into three trails, but the sign only listed two, so I’m not really sure where that third trial would have led us – it did look suspiciously as though it headed off the edge of a cliff though.

We saw some elk and moose and met several groups of hikers along the way. One nice couple took this picture of us with Grand Lake in the background. You can’t see the lake though, because we stood directly in front of it – hand slap to the forehead.

The descent to tree line was a lot of switchbacks and there was some snow across the trail and a lot of water running across.

We were still feeling pretty good and making decent time now that we were on our way downhill.

Around 2:15, we stopped to rest, eat, and refill our water bottles. After about 15 minutes we heard voices and pretty soon the shirtless couple came around the corner.

He, burned to a bright red, still talking a mile a minute, and she, looking completely miserable and irritated. He stopped to ask us if they were almost to Grand Lake. When Seth said that we were planning on getting to Grand Lake around 7:00 but that they should make it before that without heavy packs, the look that she shot him was priceless. He looked a little panicked and they both took off down the trail at a run.

We laughed about that one for quite a while. Especially when we passed a sign a little later that said it was still 8 miles to Grand Lake. They must have made it because we didn’t see them after that.

Our morale went rapidly downhill the last 8 miles. Our packs felt like they weighed 200 pounds, my feet hurt and Seth’s knee hurt, every muscle in our bodies hurt. Every time we stopped to rest, we hurt worse, so we just kept walking.

It got to the point that I was muttering a nearly constant string of four-letter words. In fact, right up until Seth took this picture, I was scowling and swearing. I straightened up, smiled for the picture, and promptly resumed my scowling and swearing as soon as the picture was over.

Just keeping it real, people.

I remembered reading on a blog that we would pass two lakes once we were close to the North Inlet Trailhead, so we were pretty excited when we started seeing water other than the stream running next to the trail.

We passed a private cabin and the trail widened to a road. There were just a few more bends in the road after that before we made it to the trailhead at 7:44 where Dale and Collette were waiting with Jackson and Tucker to pick us up.

We were so sore for the next few days that getting out of bed in the morning, getting out of a chair or off the couch, was torture, but by the end of the week we were already talking about trying again; this time with a light daypack and lighter shoes so that we could actually enjoy the entire hike and make much better time.

If we do, I will definitely take more pictures!