Page 8 - Volume 15 Number 7

The stately and sometimes ominous Stanley Hotel in RMNP’s gateway city, Estes Park, Colorado. This century-plus-old hotel helped to inspire Stephen King’s book (and later, movie)
The Shining.
no guarentee of adequate performance, aeronautical knowledge or airmanship for coping with situations that only mountain flying can conjure up. The purpose of this article is not to teach mountain flying techniques. But, I would be remiss to write anything about flying within Colorado without also emphasizing how critical specific mountain flying instruction is. Colorado is home to some of the most challenging commerical airports in the United States. For visiting pilots there is almost no airport west of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Front Range that is not inherently challenging, yet also beautiful. Factor in summer heat, and the density altitudes easily soar into levels no pilot can safely ignore. Thus, the often long runways encountered (by lowland standards) can quickly become barely or even less than adequate in the warmer months. King Airs are just the type of load- hauling aircraft that tourists and part-time residents seek when flying into mountain airports to begin their outdoor adventures. Knowing the capabilities of yourself and your aircraft before launching into or out of such areas cannot be overstated. The mountain regions of Colorado contain 13 NPS sites, including four national parks and several national monuments. All have public- use airports within reasonable driving distances that
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offer facilities appropriate to King Air operations. None should be utilized without first becoming thoroughly familiar with the surrounding terrain, facility limitations and local operational requirements.
The sheer number and size of Colorado’s public lands is daunting. Beyond the national parks and monuments are national recreation and wilderness areas and many historical and archaeological sites. Many state and county parks rival small national parks that exist in other states. Even some city parks offer terrain wholly unique within the Mountain West, such as The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. To detail them all would be far beyond the scope of this article series. Instead, we will focus on Colorado’s four national parks and the aviation facilities that can best be utilized to partake of each (two here and two in the upcoming Part II). For our discussion, we’ll assume a routing into Colorado from the east and a counter clockwise circuit. We’ll use Rocky Mountain National Park, north and west of Denver, as the initial destination.
Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP)
Considered Colorado’s signature national park, RMNP
is both vast and diverse, encompassing over 265,000 acres. It has five visitor centers and can be entered from the east, north or west. The most popular entrance is via the mountain hamlet of Estes Park, which feeds tourists nicely into three of the park’s visitor centers. Home of the historic Stanley Hotel (inspiration for the hotel in Stephen King’s, The Shining), Estes Park bustles with activity year around, yet it lacks an airport of its own. ›
JULY 2021