Alpine Visitor Center

The Alpine Visitor Center is less than a quarter mile on, on the right, with restrooms, food and a roof held down by logs. If I cut out when you shut the car off, tap play, because I've got more for you here and Boone has a tale. Turn right out of the lot to carry on west. At eleven thousand seven hundred and ninety-six feet it's the highest visitor center in the park system, open in summer only, and the Trail Ridge Store beside it has the only food you can buy inside the park. Those heavy logs on the roof aren't decoration. They're fixed in place to keep the shingles from blowing away, and a gust of seventy-nine miles an hour has been recorded at that building in summer. Stay on the pavement. The tundra between the Alpine lot and Lava Cliffs is a Tundra Closure Area. Half a mile past the lot the road swings through Medicine Bow Curve, its northernmost point. Colorado's birding trail calls it probably the best site in the nation for white-tailed ptarmigan, so quiet and so well hidden you nearly have to step on one. But before dawn in June and early July the males go up in screaming courtship flights you can hear a mile away. Elk climb up here in summer to keep cool. You can see two tree lines from the curve, the upper one where forest meets tundra, the lower one where the valley floor is too wet for trees, and past them Wyoming, thirty-five miles off. The dirt road that comes out in the Alpine lot is Old Fall River Road, one-way uphill and usually open only in summer. It can't be driven down. It was the first road over the top, and Colorado state convicts started it, thirty-eight men from the penitentiary at Canyon City. A tourist newsletter asked motorists to quit questioning them, because it held up the work. That road scared people. A ranger often had to be stationed at its switchbacks to drive frightened motorists through. Its worst drift had a name, Old Faithful, and in many years it buried the sixteen-foot telegraph poles. Men went snow-blind after a single day without sunglasses, smeared their faces with grease paint or charcoal, and quit a dozen at a time. So the park tried a show. One October crews placed six hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite where the deepest drift would form, wired to a new lead fuse filled with TNT, and the next June the public was invited to watch. A single explosion cut a three-hundred-foot trench and moved about a thousand cubic yards of snow. Each spring the plow crews on Trail Ridge Road work in from both sides and meet at the visitor center. If you've stopped here, stay close to the car for a moment. Boone has a tale next, about three minutes, and it starts on Old Fall River Road.