It was raining lightly when we drove into Wild Basin. A one lane dirt road provides access to various trail heads and picnic grounds, the Ouzel Falls trailhead is at the end of
the road. It was Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, so of course Rocky Mountain National Park was crowded. But I thought the rain would drive most people to the exit. Indeed, we met a lot of
cars headed the other way as we bounced along the dirt road. But when we got the parking lot at the end, it was completely full. There is room for perhaps 50 cars in the final lot, and every spot
was occupied. We drove around twice, but found no open parking spots, so we went back down the road to the next parking lot and stopped there. We ate lunch in the car while the rain gradually tapered
off.
We spent about 2.5 hours on this hike, finishing at about 4:30 PM. This turned out to be the most rain we experienced while hiking, we were quite fortunate the rest of our trip
to not get rained upon. If we had to get rained on, this was the hike to experience it, because the waterfalls are close to the trail (instead of trying to see panoramic vistas from the top of a mountain,
like we had in the morning from the summit of Twin Sisters).
This is a copy of the official Rocky Mountain National Park trail map for the Wild Basin area. We followed the direct route from the parking lot, past Copeland Falls, Calypso Cascade and to Ouzel Falls.
This is the view of Ouzel Falls as seen from the trail.
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This is the straight on view of the falls, you have to go a bit off of the trail for this view. You can see how hard it was raining!
   
   
   
 
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Ouzel Falls Photos
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