Western Trip Day 9 - Ghost in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park?

We were down to just one full day left,  and there was no time to waste.  I had to urge my son along on this morning,  because he seemed especially intent on stalling for time.  Perhaps the constant rushing was causing him fatigue.  But we had just this last one full day left,  and it was not to go to waste.

So,  we headed past Boulder,  a town that we both really enjoyed,  and headed towards Estes Park,  the town that enters into Rocky Mountain National Park.

But before we entered the park, we visited the famous Stanley Hotel. This is a supposedly haunted hotel,  and was famously the inspiration for Stephen King's famous novel, The Shining.

This visit was really cool for a fan of Stephen King,  like me.  The halls now have very different carpets,  which are admittedly not as scary.  However,  the place otherwise looks like the hotel from both the novel and the two movies. In fact,  the second movie (the one that King himself was a part of), was actually filmed right here at this very location.

King stayed here, famously in room 217. He must have gotten some of the original ideas for his fictional hotel from the ghost stories that are a part of the real Stanley Hotel. We all know that he likes stories about isolation,  and surely at the time that he stayed here, the hotel was on a much quieter location.  I am not sure that it was anywhere near as isolated as he made his fictional hotel from the novel,  but it surely was a lot smaller and quieter of a town back then. In fact, it very well may have seemed to King like a very isolated hotel, although surely it was not as isolated as he made his Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

Okay, in all seriousness, I had to stop right here. I was going to write more in this particular blog entry. I have to say that I felt absolutely nothing strange while in the hotel. But now, as I uploaded and then downloaded these pictures, I came across something strange, that I cannot explain. Mind you, I had been told that there were stories of ghosts showing up particularly in mirrors, so I focused on them, and took several picture of each. There are three sets of pictures for this particular mirror. The first two seem completely normal. Here they are:

Now, here's the third picture. I swear to God that I did not do anything or play any tricks here. This is the third picture, and there is clearly something there. Yet, it comes out blurry, even though everything else is crystal clear. I do not remember a person passing by at this time, although admittedly, I also do not remember no one passing by, either. Still, the image is blurry, and it seems almost like you can still see the staircase through the image, or the person, in front of the mirror. Perhaps it is a person passing by, moving, which would account for some blurriness. Yet, they do not appear in the picture itself separately, and I think I would have noticed someone wearing clothes that looked like that. The hands are not clearly distinguished. None of the features of the person (always assuming it is a person) are what they should be, it seems to me.

Here is the third picture. Maybe I was so psyched to see something strange in this picture, that I am allowing myself to get carried away, or my admittedly vivid imagination to run away with me. Please take a look at the picture, and judge for yourself:

Western Trip Day 8 - Denver

Only one destination for this day.

Yet, we saw a lot. I wanted to focus on Denver,  the biggest city by far in the American Rockies.  This was our chance to visit the capital and largest city of Colorado.

We were not disappointed,  and had a very fun,  but full,  day.

The day began in the morning,  at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Preserve, which may or may not be within Denver city limits proper.  But it is a surprisingly large expanse of land meant,  as the name suggests,  to serve as a sanctuary for local wildlife.

It took a while to see some of the animals,  but we patiently waited,  and ultimately were rewarded for trip our patience. For the last time on the trip,  we saw bison, up close and personal.  We saw many dear, and a ton of prairie dogs, as well. Of course,  prairie dogs can be plainly seen throughout the greater Denver metropolitan area,  but with this wide open space,  you really got to see them engaging in their everyday activities,  as well as seeing the numerous dug up holes that they make home.

I had seen prairie dogs once before, but it was at a zoo back east in New Jersey.  Seeing them here,  out in the wild,  was a totally different experience.  They are tiny little creatures,  and they are cute.  My son fell in love with them. Yet,  they apparently can be dangerous because of the diseases that they potentially carry, which surprisingly may include the bubonic plague.

After visiting the wildlife sanctuary,  we headed to the city limits of Denver proper.  We went to Denver Museum of  Nature and Science. It is a bit like the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City,  mixed with New York City's Museum of Natural History.  Very cool and educational.  It was informative in many regard, and we both benefited from our visit.

At the conclusion of the visit,  we saw a movie about pandas at the Imax theater inside of the museum. It, too,  was informative while also being fun.

It was a great day thus far,  but we were now  quite hungry. And so we headed to Denver's oldest steakhouse,  the Buck Horn Exchange.  This place is decorated with just a ton of stuffed animal heads and guns and old images of the Wild West,  as well as plenty of other stuff.

We ate well. I had beef, while my son tried elk. He did not like it, and so I wound up finishing it myself.  Elk was something that I,  too, had never tried. It was not bad,  and understandably reminded me of venison,  which I had only previously had a couple of times before.

After that,  we went to the Broncos stadium (I think it is called Invesco Field,  if memory serves me correctly), and took some cool pictures there,  too.

Then,  we went back near the Denver Museum of Nature and Science again.  It was closed by then, but there was a beautiful park behind it that I could not help but notice while we were there.  It seemed almost to be like Denver's answer to Central Park. It was large and gave out on a breathtaking view of downtown Denver,  and the Rocky mountains behind it.  My son and I read a little bit (we are reading Jack London's White Fang), before we explored some more.  It is a really nice park, and we eventually found ourselves back by the museum,  facing downtown Denver.  Pretty soon,  the sun began to set,  and the mountains became clearerthe later it got.

We got some amazing views,  and some of the pictures hopefully reflect that.  But it was virtually dark,  and time to start heading back to get some sleep for our last full day of this trip.

Here are some pictures from our visit to Denver:

Western Trip Day 8 - Garden of the Gods & the Manitou Cliff Dwellings

The Garden of the Gods was one of the sites that I had heard about and wanted to visit many months before this actual trip. But nearby is an amazing place which I had not heard of prior to this trip - the Manitou Cliff Dwellings , which felt like one of the best surprises of the trip.

This day would also prove to be the laziest day of this trip thus far. I had not slept well the previous night. It took a while to get to sleep,  and it was well after one in the morning before I managed to sleep.  But I woke up early,  and just felt worn pretty much all day.  Perhaps the constant rushing of the trip simply was catching up with me. Or, perhaps it was just one of those kinds of days.

It took a while to rouse myself up enough to get going on this morning,  in any case. Unfortunately,  everything just felt sluggish. Part of it was that I did not want to get caught in one of those infamous traffic jams that western cities tend to be known for.  But by around 10:30 or 11am or so,  I had to remind myself that we were on this trip and only had limited time. That was enough to get going,  and we finally started another day of exploring.

We drove the hour and a half to Colorado Springs,  where the Garden of the Gods is located. It was very bright,  and the sun had a relentless quality to it that felt reminiscent of the desert southwest.  It was really hot, and here,  it became a lot easier to believe that Colorado has a semi-arid climate,  and shares some traits with the desert farther south.

But the Garden of the Gods was worth it. It is an astonishing place with some wild formations of red rock that would not look out of place in Utah.

We took it all in,  admiring the unorthodox  landscape. It was strange,  and maybe a little unsettling,  to see signs warning that rattlesnakes may be around in the area. So we stayed mostly on the trails,  as the sign instructed us to do.

It was a beautiful place to visit,  and descriptions inevitably fall short of doing justice to this place. Look at the pictures,  and you can get a better idea of what this place is like.  It is called Garden of the Gods for a reason.

There were rock climbers scaling some really steep and difficult looking rocks. We learned that it was here that the state of Colorado got it's name.  Colorado is Spanish for the color red, after all.

We did some mild hikes where we were allowed to,  and found a nice area of rock in the shade. It was very comfortable,  and one guy there was actually sleeping.  Some young kid with a backpack who was by himself,  and he reminded me of Chris McCandless, the young man who went off on his own for a trip out West which lasted years.  He wanted, and got,  a wild Alaskan adventure, although he ultimately met with a bad end.

Anyway,  we snapped some pictures,  of course,  and then headed into the nearby town of Manitou.  It was a  nice enough looking town,  although the traffic was really bad. We then headed to the cliff dwellings,  which I really wanted to see.

When my son and I first started taking these trips out  West in 2015,  I had hoped to visit Mesa Verde.  We were then in Flagstaff, so we were not terribly far. But logistically,  it did not work out.

But we finally made it there on our next trip,  in 2016. What an amazing experience! I had wanted to visit that for many years, ever since a young boy,  seeing the image of it on the National Parks stamp series.

The one thing about it,  which is both good and bad,  is that you cannot visit inside.  That is good,  because it stays well preserved.  But the downside is that you cannot go inside of the rooms and actually see where they lived.

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings are different in that regard. You can go inside and see where the ancient ones resided. However,  you also get the definite sense that this place is not nearly as well preserved.  In fact,  the parking lot is way too close,  and you get the sense that this place is more focused on making a buck from this being an inevitable tourist destination,rather than focusingon preserving the integrity of a place of obvious significant historical and cultural value.

Nevertheless,  I felt very privileged to be able to visit it. It is significantlysmaller than Mesa Verde,  yet it also clearly resembles it. And yes,  I  definitely took advantage of actually being able to go inside of the rooms and seeing what the inside is like,  which we were not allowed to do at Mesa Verde,  for obvious reasons.

Took quite a few pictures,  to boot.  Here are some: