How to Fully Experience Rocky Mountain National Park

We tend to arrive on our vacation not only with full backpacks but full heads and heavy hearts as well. We come with a lot of baggage, demands from work and life that seem to follow us here. Some people try to continue to run their business or to handle a host of problems back home via phone and email. The truth is that these types of problems will be there next week, next month, and next year no matter how much time we put in on vacation trying to fix them. For the well-being of our soul, our mind, our emotions, and our families we need to consciously take time to set these things down and let ourselves be restored. Only then will we be in a healthier state and able to rightly judge and handle the incessant demands when we get back home.

So, I would encourage you to leave your baggage behind. Let the office and others back home know that you will be turning off for a few days or even a week. They’ll survive without you. Switch your phone off and pack it away, put an Away or Out of Office message on your email, unplug from social networks, and be fully present in this magnificent and healing wilderness.

As you hike out into the mountains, practice paying attention with all your senses. Watch the dappled light touch the forest floor. Listen to the sound of the birds and try to guess what they are saying. Feel the gentle breeze on your face, on your neck, and on your arms. Smell the wafting aromas from the drying ponderosa needles. Touch the trees’ rugged bark. As you allow yourself to be immersed in the wonder of the wilderness, you will find your racing mind begin to slow down, your cares will begin to slip away, and you will begin to feel a sense of growing wholeness. We are part of the natural world and yet our society is so divorced from it. As we return to the wilderness we start to reconnect with nature and with ourselves.

If you do this, you may discover that when you go back home, you go with a greater understanding of what’s important. You may find that you’ve slowed down and developed a new way of looking at the world. You’ll look back on this time away as one of the most meaningful of your entire life just by being fully present in nature.