This weekend I stayed in a haunted hotel... and went on a mountain hike. (picture heavy)

Mr. Writer set up a surprise getaway this weekend in Estes Park, Colorado. We stayed at The Stanley Hotel - a stunning white building seated in the shadow of Rocky Mountain National Park. According to countless stories the hotel is haunted, a legend that apparently inspired Stephen King to write The Shining, a one time guest. In fact, if you stay at The Stanley, flip your hotel television to Channel 60, where the hotel plays the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of The Shining 24 hours a day. (snort!)


Here is one of the remarkable views from the front of The Stanley. We sat on the front porch for a few hours Saturday afternoon, drank cocktails, and stared at this:


Given that we're the outdoors types, we entered the national park and hiked up the Ouzel Falls trail. At the trail head I discovered this adorable small woodland creature. It winked at me before it took off. I think it was the rum I had the night before.


The trail followed a mountain river. Here's a view of Copeland Falls earlier on the trail:


And here is Calypso Cascade. It's beautiful and idiot-proof. It comes with a sign that says "no diving or swimming." :eyes:


And here we are. Hot. Sweaty. Really needing another Clif bar. After the hike Mr. Writer treated me to a facial at the hotal spa. Then we dressed up and headed out for some succulent steaks at The Twin Owls Restaurant. I had a filet that was almost better than sex. ;)


I never saw ghosts or any supernatural activity while staying at The Stanley. I feel cheated, I tell you. They hold ghost tours of the hotel every evening. Maybe I would have met a few had I gone. Otherwise we had a relaxing weekend of hikes, goat meat, and "shin-shee shin-shee."

:hi:

this came up in conversation one day...I couldn't believe it. Pretty cool

Gorgeous place. A great place for something like that, I think.

We ate lunch there, but didn't stay overnight.

We're off to Colorado next month to visit family ... That state is quite pretty (well, the mountain half, at least) but could use an ocean ... :hide:

I like the dry air. An ocean would mess that up, I think. ;)

Only a few of the coastal areas are humid, and even then only sometimes.

We're at 76% humidity right now, but the temperature is only 64. :P

A few miles inland, the temperature is 75, and the humidity is 44%. (Solvang).

Even further inland it's 86 and the humidity is 24%. (Bakersfield).

Up in Redding it's 88 with 9% humidity.

Dry heat. :D

The pictures are beautiful.....
Looks like you had great weather to......
not sure I'm excited about the goat meat
:rofl: :rofl:

uummmm should we even ask what "shin-shee shin-shee" is

:shrug: :hide:


lost

;) I kid.

It was beautiful weather but very warm.

my dad lives up in Estes and I understand why he stays there!

:hi:

this was the first time at The Stanley. It is very beautiful.

Have I got a B&B for you!

heck, maybe that's a long weekend trip for us.

I spent years in Colo. Those pics, and countless hundreds of other scenic areas were the reason why.:hi:

He's been commuting fifty miles every day for the last couple of months and his new job has been very hectic.

This is why I'm not going back into broadcasting - I don't want to leave this place, either. :)

I was in Estes Park in 1968 for a family reunion. (We had 'em every other year, always at a different place.) I know we saw the Stanley, but I have only the vaguest of memories of it.

I did, though, get one of those fake newspaper front pages that said I climbed Long's Peak. :bounce:








Treated you to a facial, huh? Did we really need to know that? :P

The Stanley is unmistakable. You can see it from a distance. It's so vibrant.

Those newspaper front pages are cute. ;)

(and it was a "good" kind of facial, dahling.)

Wow, what gorgeous pictures!

Makes me want to get there NOW!

My husband came in to talk, and he noticed these right away...

He spent a summer in Boulder in the early '60's, playing chess...

He travelled into Estes Park, and loved it.......

Lucky you!

Thanks for posting....:hug:

And the fact that it's only 45 min. from where we live helps, too. ;)

"Hello, Danny. Come and Play With Us. Forever. And Ever. And Ever."

I haven't been there but I have been to timberline Lodge, where the movie was filmed.

Where is the Timberline Lodge?

How was the stay?

so we didn't stay.

IMDB Shining trivia: The management of the Timberline requested that Stanley Kubrick not use 217 for a room number (as specified in the book), fearing that nobody would want to stay in that room ever again. Kubrick changed the script to use the nonexistent room number 237.

:kick:

Thank you for the beautiful pictures.

:hi:

Stayed overnight in a cheap motel on the edge of town, downriver of the dam that broke in 1976. :scared:

I didnt stay longer than one night in Estes Park as I had a week and I wanted to cover much ground. I saw Fairplay, Buena Vista, Leadville (I was in Leadville the morning of 9/11), drove over Cottonwood Pass, Crested Butte, Aspen, Vail, Rocky Mtn National Park, and Ft Laramie in eastern Wyoming all in about 5 days.

What a nice trip that must have been.

from the Stanley Hotel (between the Hotel and Lake Estes). Also a cousin that I never met who was a doctor had a large house up on a hillside above Estes Park. My granparents lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, but drove out every summer to Estes Park and spent 3 months there. They did this for about 40 years. They even hiked up to the top of Long's Peak several times. I have 2 large boxes of color Kodachrome slides my grandfather took throughout Rocky Mountain National Park and the surrounding area in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and they are like a time capsule now, showing the unspoiled, idyllic, uncrowded beauty of the park. My older sisters got to go there several times for vacations, but I only got to go there twice, in 1968 and 1972. Soon after that the grandparents decided they were to old to keep going out there, so they sold the cabin. We have tried to find it but we are not sure, apparently it has been painted because it was bright red, and we couldn't find a red cabin. It was really tiny, with only one real bedroom and one bathroom. And they had no street address there - all mail was delivered to the post office only at that time. We visited the Stanley Hotel once. I have many memories and photographs of hikes we went on in Rocky Mountain National Park and the surrounding area. I guess my oldest sister has the strongest attachment to the area, since she spent the whole summer of 1959 there, at the age of 14. She just sold her house in California and bought a brand-new house right outside of Estes Park, in fact she's moving there this week on the 20th.

It was in the school house that they used in The Birds. I didn't see any ghosties there, but it was pretty cool to drive up and see a back-lit silhouette of Hitchcock in the upstairs window. They featured it later in one of those "Haunted Hotels" shows. We didn't know at the time we stayed there that it was supposed to be haunted.



I did see what I think is a ghost in a house we rented for a weekend along the Mississippi river last fall. I kid you not, I saw some dude walk out of (and thru!!) a wall in the locked sun porch of that house. I was standing in the kitchen in my nightshirt and I wasn't sure if I ought to run or just stand and stare. What made it even creepier was the fact that about 3 am the night before, the doorbell of that house started chiming--and would not shut off until I unplugged it. Nobody there--but that doorbell was ringing for a couple of minutes before I got it stopped...


We actually are booked to go back to that house next week for a few days for a family vacation.



Laura

I went out and stayed with them for a few days and was put in the Manor House a few buildings away from the main building. I was the only person staying in that building at the time. (I was staying for free) AND guess what book I was reading at the time?

Yup! The Shining! At about 2am I was so completely freaked out that I got up and sat in the lobby of the main hotel. I didn't get back to sleep until it was light.

and that is a great pic of you and your husband.

I'm glad you had a nice time. :D

I am glad you had a good time.
Thank you for sharing these wonderful pictures :)

I'll have to visit there if/when I get the chance.

Looks like you had a fantastic w/e, Writer! :hi:

did two episodes on the Stanley Hotel, both times invited in by the owners/management. If you ever watch it, you know that they guys are really eager to debunk claims, but will always yield if there are genuine phenomena which they can't explain. In both episodes, they were able to capture eerie events that were completely unexplainable. If you go again, ask to go down to the basement/employees' entrance, a long corridor with the side of the mountain actually on one side and the man-made corridor on the other side. In the second episode they filmed, it was a live episode (I think it was Halloween, 2006) and they heard an actual voice emanating from this cave area. Someone texted to them that there had been a 12 year old daughter of one of the workers who evidently was a possible source.

In the first episode they did, Jason Hawes (one of the leaders of TAPS--the group that makes up the Ghosthunters") was sleeping with the DVD camera on in his room awoke when his water glass on the bed-table actually smashed without apparent cause. In another shot, Grant Wilson, the other leader of TAPS, was sitting down putting new batteries in his camera, and the table next to him and the chair he was sitting on were tipped, again without apparent cause.

It sounds positively gleeful--I hope you get another chance to go there!

BTW, those pictures are great! I'm glad you had a good time!

I want to go there! :bounce: