Estes Park and the Stanley Hotel

Estes Park is the nicest town location i've seen in Colorado, with hiking opportunities in every direction, cool rock formations all over the town and several lakes. It's very small though, at less than 6,000 people, and much of the land or roads i saw were privately owned ranchland, which could ruin all those outdoor possibilities. At 7,500 feet in the middle of the rockies, the weather is STILL warmer in general than Alaska.

 Approaching the town from the south you drive along a reservoir past a bunch of cool rock towers and hills with houses scattered among them.

Estes Park is different than most Colorado mountain towns because it was never founded based on any mining activities. It's pretty much been about tourism from the very beginning. Instead of miners getting into gunfights over claims in Estes hiking guides would get into gunfights over arguments about proper guiding.

As I approached Estes Park from Boulder via Nederland, i drove through several of those old mining towns and passed by Rocky Mountain National Park. I entered the park but it was too early in the year to get very far up into the mountains. The drive was pleasant and i arrived in Estes with more time than i expected before i had to leave to Ft. Collins.

Three streams converge in downtown. This one is the Fall River.

 Downtown and the historic theater where i saw the film festival.

 Rock formations are all over town and some buildings run right up against them.

The town has elk and statues of elk. I guess elk are to Estes Park as Moose are to Anchorage.

I ate at a good Nepali/Northern India restaurant and later while i was looking at the town a girl approached me and asked if i was there for some special event. I told her i was not and she said she didn't know what was going on but she had seen a lot of people that day with professional looking cameras. After wandering off a few more blocks i found out why. It was the week of a horror film festival called the "Stanley Film Fest"

This information started an interesting cascade of misunderstandings on my part. Somewhere i saw that they were showing "The Shining" at the film festival, so i assumed the festival was named after Stanly Kubrick. Then a guy working the entrance told me the festival was named after the hotel in The Shining, which was in the town. That was fantastic news because i've always wanted to see the hotel in the Shining, called the Overlook Hotel. Many years ago i worked at the Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier Park. Many Glacier was originally a candidate for the hotel in the Shining and if you have ever worked in it you would know why. It has arguably the most spectacular view of any hotel in the U.S.. It's big and old with lots of animals adorning the walls, big timber construction, and a sublevel of distorted hallways from a century of high winds and settling.

The smallest movie theater i have ever seen.

The films showing for the day in that tiny theater.
The view outside the Stanley Hotel.

The hotel was packed with visitors associated with the festival and there were some things like this in the lobby.

The hotel is very atmospheric but you aren't allowed to go up this spooky stairwell unless you are a guest. The hotel really plays up it's ghostly history, with tours and a book full of horrifically executed photos of ghosts spotted on the premises.

The weather in Glacier Park was deemed too horrible in winter to film a movie but the beginning of the movie is still shot in Glacier Park, Montana, adding some confusion. Even more confusing is that the exterior shots of the hotel in the movie are of the Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, in Oregon. I've been to this hotel too, and it is a neat hotel, though much smaller than i expected. So, being able to visit the Overlook Hotel would complete my unconscious quest to see all three hotels.

It wasn't really until i drove the 3 miles over to the hotel that i started to understand my confusion. The Stanley Hotel is not in the movie "The Shining". Instead, it was the hotel that inspired the story for "The Shining" story after Steven King spent time staying at the hotel. It was however, the location of the TV adaptation of "The Shining", and most importantly of all it was used in Dumb and Dumber.

The interior of the hotel in the movie was a set built in England and based partly on the interior of the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. I've been to that very nice hotel as well, so i can still say i have all my bases covered now in regards to the movie. My confusion arose because i am a bigger fan of Stanley Kubrick than i am of Stephen King, but it blew my mind that i stumbled into so much entertainment without any planning and completed my checklist by accident in the process! Shamefully i have never even read a novel of Steven King. The stories just don't sound scary to me.

A dark canyon along the Little Thompson River along highway 34 to Loveland.

I took an immediate liking for Estes Park and kinda felt like my kind of place to live in. I would have stayed the night but i already had lodging in Ft. Collins so i headed out after about 4 hours in town. I took Highway 34 to Loveland, which passes through a spectacular canyon. A few years prior record floods had destroyed most of the highway through this canyon and it had to be completely rebuilt. They did it incredibly fast.

I don't know what it used to look like but now the road is well elevated and reinforced with iron pilings.

The canyon offered impressive climbing opportunities.

The streams all along the front range were filthy looking but it may have been spring runoff. I hope so. You can see where the banks were heavily eroded from the floods. There were many examples of upended huge boulders and captured debris from the destruction. Not even having witnessed it i could tell it had been a huge flood.

Suddenly you exit the canyon and the landscape immediately opens up into ranchy prairie land. I was not expecting to still be seeing the colors of the Colorado Plateau so far to the Northeast.