Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado) will start operating its Hiker Shuttle from May 27 to October 10, from Estes Park Visitor Center to the Park & Ride Transit hub at Bear Lake Road. No other stops in the park are included.
At the Park & Ride, riders will transfer to the Bear Lake Road or Morain Park shuttles to reach their trailhead destinations.
As part of the park’s overall pilot-timed entry system, the Hiker Shuttle will require two things to allow someone on the bus: reservation tickets and a valid park entrance pass. A single person can reserve up to four tickets per $2 reservation.
At 5 PM the night before, the RMNP Hiker Shuttle Reservations will have limited tickets available for seven specific time slots. For instance, if a person plans to reserve a spot on the shuttle for May 27, the tickets for that date will be available on May 26, at 5 PM, according to the news release.
Riders can use an existing annual or lifetime pass like a senior pass or purchase a day pass on recreation.gov to meet the park entrance pass requirement of the shuttle. Private vehicle access is not permitted with a Hiker Shuttle ticket.
Time slots for the Hiker Shuttle departure from Estes Park Visitor Center to the Bear Lake Road Park & Ride are 9 AM, 9:45 AM, 10:30 AM, 11:15 AM, 12 NN, 12:45 PM, 1:30 PM, and 2:15 PM. Passengers must depart in the time slots they reserved.
The Hiker Shuttle will return from the Park & Ride to the Estes Park Visitor Center every 45 minutes beginning from 9:45 AM to 5:15 PM. Passengers can use the Hiker Shuttle to return to the center throughout the day.
The last shuttle will leave the Park & Ride at 5:15 PM, after which no more buses will make another trip. For further details regarding the shuttle and its trips, visit RMNP Shuttle Buses.
The Hiker Shuttle route has operated since 2006. In 2019, over 45,000 park visitors used the bus. However, operations stopped in 2020 and 2021.
Visitors can park at the Estes Park Visitor Center parking lot or use the existing town to Estes Park transit system to ride from where they are staying to the center. Since 2017, wait times for the Hiker Shuttle from the visitor center usually took around one to two hours.
Rocky Mountain National Park is one of the busiest national parks in the country, placing third in 2019 with over 4.6 million visitors, which is a 42% increase in visitation in seven years.
Visitor crowding and congestion have increased negative impacts on visitor and staff safety, resource protection, customer experience, and operational capacity. In the last six years, the park has piloted numerous visitor-use management programs, including managing vehicle access to first-come, first-serve strategies in 2016-2019 in highly congested areas.
The first-come, first-serve restrictions initially had limited success. Over time, it started to love effectiveness as the adverse effects kept increasing, impacting other park areas.
The park also initiated a park-wide timed entry permit reservation system from 2020 to 2021 and will pilot a similar strategy this year. Park staff are researching various strategies back to 2016, including timed entry reservations on the Hiker Shuttle to inform long-range day-use visitor access strategies.
For inquiries regarding the Hiker Shuttle, visit https://www.nps.gov/romo/planyourvisit/timed-entry-permit-system.htm.
For further information about Rocky Mountain National Park, visit www.nps.gov/romo, follow the park on social media @RockyNPS, or call the park’s Information Office at (970) 586-1206.