Lory State Park

Author's Comments

Lory does not announce itself. You drive in past the entrance station, past the meadow where the deer are usually working through the grass at the edge of the trees, and the hogbacks rise on your left in that particular way the Front Range has of suggesting more country than it shows you at first. The park sits in a transitional zone, geologically and visually. Grasslands give way to ponderosa, ponderosa gives way to rock, and the rock gives way to sky. Arthur's Rock is the obvious destination and I will not pretend otherwise. The trail climbs through a small canyon, switches up through scrub oak, and delivers you to a granite shoulder where Horsetooth Reservoir spreads out below and the plains run east until they stop being plains and start being weather. Late September is when I prefer it. The oak goes rust and copper, the air sharpens, and the golden hour up there lasts longer than it has any right to because the western ridge holds the light and throws it back across the water. What I keep coming back for, though, is not the summit. It is the middle distance on the way up, where the trail levels for a stretch and you can see the hogback in profile against the reservoir, the layers reading clearly: stone, water, plain, sky. A wide lens does the work but a longer one finds the better picture, compressing the ridges into something almost geological in its honesty. Come on a weekday if you can. The lot fills early on Saturdays and the trail loses some of its quiet when it does.

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