“This is what people think of when they think of a national park,” I tell myself. I am in the parking lot of the Moraine Park Museum, looking up the glacial valley to a row of peaks – the 12,000- and 13,000 footers – that are mapped out on the display board before me: Flattop Mountain, Hallet Peak, Thatchtop, Storm Peak, and back behind them all, the 14,000-foot Longs Peak.

Folks may someday let national historic sites go –  battlefields, memorials and the like – but I believe they will hang on to grandeur until the end. Preserving majesty makes us feel majestic ourselves, as if we’ve done a magnanimous thing in acknowledging that this place, these mountains, are greater than ourselves. I don’t suppose it diminishes the peaks that we flatter ourselves. It doesn’t look like anything could bother them.

Nevertheless, my running joke has been that, in the 25 years since I last set foot in Colorado, the Rockies are not quite as high as they used to be, what with erosion and all.

I am taking the drive up to Bear Lake and, because I have handicapped plates, I’m allowed to go all the way up and park in one of the few spots still open. Most folks have to take a shuttle from down below, and the park is crowded.

The rangers have suggested that I can handle the hiking path that leads from the Bear Lake parking lot up to Alberta Falls, some 45-minutes going up and not so much coming down. But it’s harder than I had imagined and as I push on I think that I am not so much steeling myself as I am making myself iron: More brittle and less polished than steel, more likely to break, but older and more organic. 

When I reach the falls they are crowded with folks taking pictures and I join them by taking pictures of strangers taking pictures, since photography seems to be as much a part of the national park experience as anything. A young man has lowered himself into the narrow gorge, trying to get a shot of both girlfriend and waterfall. Nearby a chipmunk watches from his own rock. I take a picture of both the cameraman and, later, another chipmunk.

But the photos are not particularly good. And it is after visiting Rocky Mountain National Park that I realize I don’t really care. The fact is, I have learned to not take many pictures when I travel, both because I’m not that good of a photographer and because I don’t want the trip to become about taking pictures.

My strongest impressions of Rocky Mountain, for instance, are internal: The will to iron that I mentioned above; the near-helplessness that I feel a few hours later as I drive up Trail Ridge Road and realize that diverging a few feet on either side will plunge me 1,000 feet below; the dizzy stuttering in my head that surprises me when I try to hike up the 11,000-foot-high Tundra Communities Trail and have to give it up… 

Nevertheless, I am so impressed with the park that the next day I return with my younger sister, who’s been attending a real estate conference in Denver. The outdoors, she says, don’t do anything for her, but I’m convinced she’ll change her mind when I show her that magnificent row of peaks I encountered when I first entered the park. 

We get out before the vista and I stand back, waiting for her expressions of awe. 

“Is that it?” she says, and I have to laugh. 

That’s a favorite park memory, too, and there’s not a photo in the world that could communicate what I learned about the gulf between us, and how we bridge it with a smile.