We got up early but not early enough to get a parking spot at the Bear Lake parking lot. You would think there would be tons of space at 7 AM. But you would be wrong. So we parked a few miles down the road and took the shuttle bus up there. It actually worked out pretty well so it wasn’t too big of a deal.
The hike from Bear Lake will actually take you to four different lakes – Nymph Lake, Dream Lake, and Emerald Lake being the others. It’s a pretty popular hike but I wouldn’t say it was easy. It’s a pretty steady uphill climb but it’s definitely worth it.
My favorite lake was Dream Lake. It’s a longer, skinnier lake than the rest and there’s a lot of nice large boulders close to the shore. So you can climb on them and it makes a really good place to chill or fish. Emerald Lake was really cool too. The views of the nearby mountains were fantastic. But there were a ton of people up there and it just seemed overcrowded.
We tried fishing at both Emerald and Dream but we had no luck at either. We didn’t see any fish at Emerald Lake, even though the ranger told us there were some up there. There were a ton of fish at Dream Lake but they just weren’t interested in what we had.
We had some bait and a few different lures but it seemed that the fish were eating a lot of flies on the surface of the water. If we had some fly rods I think we would have done very well there.
People would walk past and naturally ask us how many fish we had caught. It got a bit old after the fifth or sixth time. I wanted to tell them that we had caught tons of them but I wasn’t in the mood to lie.
It was funny though because the fish were so easy to see. A lot of people were confused because they could point to the fish in the water as they swam past. How couldn’t we catch them if that were the case?
It started raining pretty heavily when we were getting out of there. But we got back via the bus and then we drove the alpine road back to the visitors center. We had driven it in the dark a day earlier and I wanted to make sure that Matt had an opportunity to see the park from the top. The weather was pretty shit so we only drove along the ridge and saw the views from the road.
From there we just wandered back to Denver. Had some lunch in Estes Park and then drove back. We were thinking of getting another camp spot for the night but the weather was unclear so we just decided to head back.