The same few months of 2020 that Colorado crown jewel Rocky Mountain National Park was suffering its worst losses from COVID closures, the whole place also nearly burned down. 

Now, things are looking up in the original Switzerland of the West.  

The park’s in-house firefighting crew, which said they’d been prepping for a sparkfest like East Troublesome for 20 years, used a landscaping “catcher’s mitt” to stop the record fire from blazing on into Estes Park in October 2020. Those crews will be following up on that success with new federal grants to bolster firewall efforts on Deer Mountain, which stands sentinel between prime wildfire paths and Estes Park, evacuated as a precaution before East Troublesome smoldered out. 

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And with COVID’s grip loosened from much of the American psyche, the park returned to 4.4 million visitors last year — not a record, but enough to reinforce a timed-entry system that by some evaluations is going well. 

Now park folks are ready to brag about some wins, not just some avoided losses. 

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