Estes Park history: the Circle, the earl's hunting ground, the Stanley, a national park and three floods

Estes Park sits in a mountain valley at the east entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, and the Park Service names it as one of the park’s two gateway communities, with Grand Lake on the west side. This is the short version, from the sources listed at the foot; where they disagree, both are given. The Town of Estes Park’s own website refused automated reads, so nothing here comes from it.

The Circle

The Park Service dates the first humans here to some 11,000 years ago, and says the Ute, though the area was never their year-round home, favored its valleys and lakes and dominated it until the late 1700s. Wikipedia’s history of the park has the Arapaho pushing the Ute out of Estes Park in the early 1800s. The Stanley Hotel’s history says the valley was known first to the Ute and Arapaho nations as “The Circle”; Wikipedia’s article on the town gives the name to the Arapaho, who spent their summers here. When three elderly Arapaho men toured the valley in 1914, the same article says, they pointed out where they had camped around Mary’s Lake in the 1850s and the eagle traps they had built on Longs Peak.

Joel Estes and the first visitors

The town is named for Joel Estes, a Missourian who found the valley with his son Milton on a hunting trip in October 1859. The two Wikipedia articles differ on when he brought his family: 1860 in the history of the park, 1863 in the article on the town. The park history says he ran cattle on the meadows and sold deer and elk meat and hides in Denver, that his party included five enslaved Black people, whom he freed on a trip to Missouri in 1861, and that the winters drove the family out in 1866.

William Byers, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, visited in 1864, and the park history credits his newspaper articles with the valley’s name. In 1868 he was in the party, with John Wesley Powell, that made the first recorded ascent of Longs Peak.

Griff Evans and his family arrived in 1867 to look after the old Estes ranch and started building cabins for travelers; when Isabella Bird rode in, in 1873, he already had nine guests. Bird stayed at Evans’s camp on Fish Creek, the Park Service says, and her letters to her sister in Scotland became A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, published in 1879. Her guide up Longs Peak, Jim Nugent, known as Rocky Mountain Jim, was shot by Evans in a quarrel in 1874 and died of the wound; Evans was acquitted in 1875.

The earl’s hunting ground

The first great landowner was an Irish peer. The 4th Earl of Dunraven came to hunt elk in 1872 and set out to make the valley a private game preserve, gathering land through homestead claims filed by drifters and bought from them for nominal sums. How much he held depends on which article you read: 6,000 acres in the one on the town, 8,000 acres bought and 15,000 controlled in the history of the park, 15,000 acres claimed in the one on the Stanley Hotel. Locals resented it, and the scheme failed. In 1876 he paid Albert Bierstadt $15,000 for a large painting of Longs Peak and the valley; the lake where Bierstadt liked to sketch is now Bierstadt Lake. In July 1877 Dunraven opened the valley’s first resort, the Estes Park Hotel, which burned in 1911, and in 1908 he sold most of his remaining land to F.O. Stanley and B.D. Sanborn.

Others came to stay. Alex and Clara MacGregor homesteaded at the foot of Lumpy Ridge, and in 1874 MacGregor incorporated a company to build a toll road from Lyons, the forerunner of today’s US 36. The MacGregor Ranch gives its founding as 1873; it is still a working ranch, run by the Muriel L. MacGregor Charitable Trust, and the family home is a museum, closed now until next summer.

Steam cars and a grand hotel

The railroad reached Lyons in 1881, a road up the Big Thompson Canyon from Loveland followed in 1903 or 1904, depending on the article, and in 1907 three Loveland men started the first auto stage line to Estes Park, using Stanley Steamers.

The man behind the Steamers came for his lungs. Freelan Oscar Stanley, co-founder of the Stanley Motor Carriage Company, was sent to Estes Park in 1903 with a resurgence of tuberculosis, recovered, and resolved to make the place a resort. The Stanley opened on July 4, 1909, with electric lights, telephones and en suite bathrooms, the hotel says. He had suggested calling it the Dunraven; 180 people signed a buckskin petition asking him to name it for himself instead.

A national park, then a town

Enos Mills arrived in 1884, a 14-year-old from Kansas, and became a naturalist, nature guide and lodge owner. From 1909, the Park Service’s brief history says, he campaigned for a national park here, lecturing across the country, writing thousands of letters and articles and lobbying Congress; the Denver Chamber of Commerce and the Colorado Mountain Club backed him, and mining, logging and farm interests opposed him. Mary Belle King Sherman, who moved to Estes Park in 1909, rallied the women’s clubs and became known as the “National Park Lady.” President Woodrow Wilson signed the Rocky Mountain National Park Act on January 26, 1915, for a park of 358.3 square miles; the Park Service’s photograph of the dedication on September 4, 1915, shows Mills, Stanley and Sherman among those there.

The town took shape in the same years. It had a seasonal newspaper, the Estes Park Trail, by 1912; in 1916 the town’s women’s club started a library of 262 books in the old schoolhouse, the beginning of the Estes Valley Library; and the Town of Estes Park was incorporated on April 17, 1917. The state’s census file gives the same year. The Stanley’s history credits Stanley, in some small part, for the waterworks, power plant and civic organizations the new town had.

Roads over the Divide, water under it

The park was, in the Park Service’s words, always an auto park: no railroad ever served it. Fall River Road, the first road across the mountains, was built by the state and Larimer and Grand counties between 1913 and 1920; Trail Ridge Road replaced it, built between 1926 and 1932 by the Park Service’s account, or from 1929 to Fall River Pass by 1932 and on to Grand Lake by 1938 by Wikipedia’s. The 48-mile road is closed from about mid-October to late May.

Then came the water. The Colorado-Big Thompson Project, built by the Bureau of Reclamation from 1938, carries West Slope water east through the Alva B. Adams Tunnel under the Continental Divide. The first water reached the tunnel’s East Portal on June 23, 1947, and the project was substantially complete in 1957, Northern Water records. Lake Estes is part of it: work on Olympus Dam began in the summer of 1947 and the lake began filling in November 1948, at a cost of $2.4 million (Northern Water). Wikipedia dates the finished dam to 1949 and calls the lake the town’s main source of drinking water.

After the war

After World War II the Park Service’s Mission 66 program built the Beaver Meadows visitor center and bought many of the old guest lodges inside the park, clearing them for campgrounds and parking lots. From 1955 to 1991 the park also had a ski area, Hidden Valley, on US 34 five miles west of town. The town grew slowly: the state’s census file counts 417 people in 1930, 1,617 in 1950, 1,175 in 1960, 2,703 in 1980 and 5,413 in 2000.

The Stanley, which opened only in summer until 1983, found a second life in fiction as the inspiration for the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining. The hotel’s Shining tour explains why Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film was not shot there and why the 1997 television miniseries was.

Three floods

On July 31, 1976, a stalled thunderstorm dropped 12 to 14 inches of rain near Estes Park, and the Big Thompson flood through the canyon below town killed at least 144 people; US 34 reopened 86 days later.

On July 15, 1982, the earthen Lawn Lake Dam failed, high in the park at Lawn Lake, which hikers reach today from the Lawn Lake trailhead. The water killed three campers, broke the Cascade Dam on Fall River and reached downtown, damaging 177 businesses, three-quarters of the town’s commercial activity, and causing $31 million in damage before Olympus Dam held it at Lake Estes. Downtown was rebuilt with a river walk between Elkhorn Avenue and the Big Thompson.

In 2013 floods damaged US 36 and US 34, the town’s main roads in, and cut off hundreds of residents when sections of Fish Creek Road and all nine crossings over Fish Creek were destroyed. CDOT says more than 100 people were airlifted out of the Big Thompson Canyon; it reopened US 34 to all traffic on May 24, 2018, the road armored with 95,000 cubic yards of rock.

The town today

The 2020 census counted 5,904 people in the town. The elk that drew the earl still come down from the high country to the montane meadows every autumn for the rut. And the park now manages day visits with timed-entry reservations under a plan finalized in May 2024, needed this year from May 22 to October 12, and to October 18 on Bear Lake Road.