Bear Lake is Rocky Mountain National Park’s most popular trailhead. As you walk a few yards from the multi-acre parking lot to the lake, you will see more people at any time of the day or year than at any other spot in the park. In summer a free mass transit system connects Bear Lake with a parking area across the road from Glacier Basin Campground, 4.8 miles from the beginning of Bear Lake Road, west of the Beaver Meadows entrance to the park (see “Bear Lake Shuttle Bus Service,” page 21). Buses relieve the gas-guzzling traffic jams and provide many advantages to hikers. Check with the National Park Service for details about the system’s operation.
Bear Lake teems not only with people but with people-habituated Clark’s nutcrackers, gray and Steller’s jays, chipmunks, golden-mantled ground squirrels, and red squirrels (chickarees). Feeding wild animals is against park regulations and can lead to trouble for you or for the next person who happens by and does not pay the peanut toll. The rodents reputedly bite. Additionally, fleas carrying bubonic plague (or Black Death, which killed 25 percent of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century) have been found on rodents in the park. Human infection by this disease in Colorado is extremely rare, but it never hurts to be wary.