National Park Guide: Colorado's Rocky Mountain

— -- After a hectic tax season, accountant Robin McBride of Briggsdale, Colo., makes an annual retreat from civilization with her dog.

She leaves behind her clients, her husband and her family, exchanging IRS form 1040s for the 14,000-foot heights of Rocky Mountain National Park about three hours away.

"It's just really peaceful," says McBride, 37. "I check into the cabin and literally do nothing for four days."

McBride is one of the 3 million people who visit the 415-square-mile park, known locally as Rocky, each year.

About a two-hour drive northwest of Denver, the park was created in 1915 to protect the wildlife, sweeping vistas, snowcapped mountains, plains teeming with wildlife and the headwaters of the mighty Colorado River.

Artist and first-time visitor Patricia Bosze of Fort Clark Springs, Texas, says she had always wanted to visit Rocky and jumped at the chance when a friend's granddaughter was married in nearby Estes Park.

"As vast and wonderful as Texas is, it doesn't have anything like this," Bosze, 68, says, sweeping her arm to encompass snowy peaks forming the park's spine.

On a recent morning's visit, Bosze and a friend saw elk, deer, moose, bighorn sheep and a chipmunk so friendly it climbed up into her hand.

"I got it all," she says.

Fellow Texan Herbert Young of Houston says the animals are what drew him and his wife, Symentres, to the park while on a driving vacation. Rocky is home to the highest continuous paved road in the country, topping out at 12,183 feet — 2 miles above sea level.

Elk are commonly seen in the park. An estimated 2,300 of them roam the valleys and mountains, often loitering near the roads and giving awestruck visitors a chance to see the massive animals up close from the safety of their cars.

"That's what makes the park," Young says.

Rocky Superintendent Vaughn Baker says the Youngs' experience is typical of park visitors, who use their cars to experience the wilderness.

"We like to say we're a backyard wilderness for the whole Front Range and really the entire Midwest," Baker says. "For those people who can hike up to the high country and earn it, that's great. But the thing that sets us apart is being able to get up into that high alpine environment easily."

That point got driven home for Indiana resident Andrea Coahran, 42, a few years ago when she was stopped atop Trail Ridge Road watching a thunderstorm roll across the valley below.

"It just felt like you were on top of the world," she says. "You feel really small, and you realize how big the Earth is."

While the vast majority of Rocky visitors remain relatively close to their cars and paved roads, the 14,259-foot-tall Longs Peak draws thousands of hikers each year, although only about 10,000 reach the summit annually, according to park research.

Much of the trail is above tree line, and hikers start before daybreak, their headlamps dotting the trail as it snakes 7.5 miles up the massive flat-topped peak featured on the Colorado quarter. Because the Longs Peak trek is so different than the "backyard wilderness" most other park visitors experience, rangers repeatedly warn hikers about the dangers they face.

For backpackers Ashley Ryan and Tara Borman, however, that danger is part of the park's attraction. The two recently prepared to head out into the wilderness for four days of hiking, camping and rock climbing in the park's snow-free lower elevations.