Estes Park – At 2:30 Wednesday morning, when Vince Talavera and Stephen Wilfong arrived at the Longs Peak trailhead, the parking lot was already half full with cars.
By sunrise, every space had been taken, and cars were parked on the shoulders of a county road as far as a half-mile away from the official beginning of the hike.
“That’s midweek,” said Wilfong, a 17-year-old Boulder resident. “You can imagine what it’s like on a Saturday.”
Indeed, officials at Rocky Mountain National Park say that the crowds at Longs Peak and other spots along the park’s east side have reached a critical level. The congestion is prompting a new look at management there, and officials are considering some fairly drastic changes.
“It’s a problem that increases every year. It’s a popular place,” said chief ranger Mark Magnuson. “We want to accommodate the visitors, but we don’t know if we can ever build enough parking.”
Park planners have teamed with their counterparts from the adjacent Roosevelt- Arapaho National Forest in drafting new plans for the Colorado 7 corridor. The plans could include expanding parking at several trailheads and – for the first time – charging fees and requiring permits for access to Longs Peak.
Under an environmental assessment, expected to be unveiled in the fall, park officials also are considering closing the Longs Peak campground. That would make room for additional trail parking and minimize noise complaints involving the neighboring private youth camp.
“It’s right next to the Longs Peak campground, and, in fact, the only way into the camp is through our campground,” park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said about Camp Timberline.
Since the Christian summer camp opened a couple of years ago, visitors staying at the Longs Peak campground have voiced complaints about late-night noise, Patterson said. Administrators since have imposed quiet hours to mirror those of the park campground and tried to schedule truck deliveries during the day.
“It really isn’t much of a problem anymore,” said George Bush, a volunteer park service campground host who parked his RV right next to the Camp Timberline property line. “They can be loud sometimes, but we can be loud, too.”
Park officials don’t point fingers at the camp – which sits on private property – but they acknowledge the potential for conflict between climbers who want to sleep quietly before a pre-dawn hike and a camp full of energetic teens.
“They definitely have a problem up there,” Talavera said. “Instead of being a national park, it felt more like New York City.”
Closing the campground could open up more room for parking for Longs Peak, Magnuson said.
“There can be as many as 125 vehicles parked outside the park on the county road now,” he said.
In the summer of 2002, the latest year for which figures are available, an average of 300 people departed the Longs Peak trailhead on weekdays and 675 on weekends. Some 28 percent of visitors reported being dissatisfied with the parking at the Longs Peak trailhead, according to a University of Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center study. The authors noted that the percentage could be much higher because they did not interview people who left because they couldn’t find a space.
When Jeff Valliere took his father on a day trip to the park a few years ago, he experienced similar frustration.
“The cars were backed up down the road for a mile,” he recounted. “Cars were even parked in the ditch.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
