As Spring Beckons

Dream Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

In this dreamscape image at the American Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, hikers stand on the shore of Dream Lake and admire the traverse between Hallet’s Peak and Flat Top Mountain to the west. Dream Lake is accessible from the popular Bear Lake trail head, on an fairly easy hike through fresh snow tracks on a four kilometer round-trip. The overcast sky threatens rain – and more – in early May, as blue skies peek intermittently from beyond.

Here in this sub-alpine landscape, snow-fields create their own pathways, levitating and deviating from the still-buried gravel. Beneath the crushed-snow underfoot, spring heralds a brief summer escapade and slowly but surely warms and melts the mountain-ice into magical crevasses and sturdy streams. Nearby Alberta Falls (2.6 km round-trip from Glacier Gorge trail-head) gathers headwaters as it rushes and hurtles down Glacier Creek, lending urgency to the rush of spring.

Above the alpine-treeline, along the yet-to-be opened Trail Ridge Road, it is paws, wheels and beaks that dominate. Here the dark-eyed Junco blends in oh-so-well with the changing foliage, completing a picture-perfect finishing for the off-season traveler.