"A Walk in the Park" Traverse 

Other trip reports containing significant portions of this route: 
Category: Colorado (RMNP)Summit Elev: 11,482-14,255 ftRock Type: Gneiss, Biotite schist, Granite
Date: July 7, 2020 (Tue)Trip Report #: 431Partner: solo

"A Walk in the Park" Traverse (aka "The Great Wheel") (~15 miles, rock up to 5.4, 13 hours car to car)

A round tour traverse of 8 summits along the entire rim of Glacier Gorge.

Panoramas showing the peaks of The Great Wheel Traverse.

INTRO

"A Walk in the Park" spans the entire rim of Glacier Gorge, traversing the eight summits in fifteen miles. It is an athletic circuit with several route-finding challenges and occasional sections of low-5th class climbing. It was originally named "The Great Wheel", but this had only been done in pieces, and after Richard Rossiter completed the entire circuit in a single push in 2009, he renamed it "A Walk in the Park" in his published guidebook.

I did this traverse solo, wearing only approach shoes and carrying a light daypack with an extra layer, a headlight, my phone, some food and water, and my camera. I never stopped for more than a few minutes, maintaining steady travel at a relatively relaxed pace, taking lots of photos as I went. I had no real route-finding issues, although I spent a bit of time on Pagoda finding a 5.4 route on the NW side that I was comfortable with. The entire traverse from Glacier Gorge Trailhead and back again took me exactly 13 hours, to the minute. This was also the car-to-car time achieved by Richard Rossiter in 2009. I know people have done the traverse significantly faster (check out mountainproject comments for some fast car-to-car times), and I feel I could probably shave a few hours off of my time if I wanted to go for speed, but I am was in no real hurry and my only real goal was to enjoy a nice day out in the park. 

(One of the reasons I did this traverse was to scope out the section from Powell to Longs, for an amazing 50 mile traverse of the entire Estes Park skyline from Mummy to Meeker, which my climbing partner Nate and I successfully executed the following week. Click the link for a trip report for this "Estes Skyline High Route".)

The following page gives a map, google earth overlay, route summary, stats, and photos from the day. What a wonderful walk in the park!

MAP

GOOGLE EARTH OVERLAY

STATS

Note: I also recorded my time splits on the Estes Skyline High Route, which includes the portion from Powell to Longs. These time splits are given in blue below.

Walk in the Park Stats

PHOTOS

The rest of this page contains photos from the traverse, broken down into the sections pertaining to each of the eight summits. Enjoy!

If the content appears to be truncated here, you may need to put your cursor in the region of text above the red line and scroll down to see more!

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