Our journey with Mikaila and Lucas began as a typical engagement session, but it quickly transformed into something extraordinary – a heartwarming friendship built on shared passion and the magic of love. Join us as we recount their enchanting engagement session amidst the awe-inspiring beauty of the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.
The Best Photo Locations in Rocky Mountain National Park
Rocky Mountain National Park is one of our favorite locations for portraits, including engagement, wedding, and family sessions. Only an hour from Boulder, it’s a great option to get incredible views with big mountains, vast prairies, pine and aspen forests, lakes, rivers, and wildlife!
We’ll consult with you to choose the perfect locations for you. We have a couple of different driving loops where we can stop and get stunning photos right from the side of the road. If you’re looking for a little more adventure, there are a ton of different hikes of varying difficulty where we can get into backcountry, further from the crowds, and into lesser seen and stunning views! We’d love to go on an adventure with you!
Fall River Road Entrance
This is the entrance we prefer when the timeline is tight, such as on a wedding day. A short way into the park is an area where we can get multiple great perspectives from one stop.
Beaver Meadows
Right off of US-36, there are a few pullouts that give us stunning views of the vast Beaver Meadows below, Longs Peak in the distance, and multiple layers of mountains on the horizon.
Rainbow Curve Overlook
Nearly 11,000’ up, on the way up Trail Ridge Road, there’s a parking area with incredible views of the Hidden Valley Creek and Horseshoe Park below. This one is a stunner with 270 degree views for miles. During winter season, which is November through May, this is as high up as we can drive in the park.
Forest Canyon Overlook
As long as Trail Ridge Road is open for the season (June through October) we love to drive all the way up to about 12,000’ to the Forest Canyon Overlook. We try to time our sessions to finish here near sunset as the light and views are incredible! It is always colder up here, so be sure to be prepared with some extra layers, a jacket, and a positive attitude :) The views are definitely worth it!
Moraine Park
Moraine Park is a wonderful spot if you’re looking for vast views. Right off of the side of the road, we can enter a beautiful prairie and have multiple angles to work with to get huge mountains in the background. There are some patches of pine trees as well, rocks for some sitting scenes, and works really well with the light any time of the day.
Sprague Lake
If you’d like to include some water in your scenery, Sprague Lake is the most accessible. There’s a short 5 minute walk through beautiful pine forest to get to the lake. This is also a great area if we’re seeking out fall colors when the aspens are changing.
Emerald Lake and Dream Lake
If you’d like to get a bit more into the backcountry and are up for a 3 mile round trip hike, the Emerald Lake hike is a stunner with a ton of amazing scenery along the way. This hike includes waterfalls, giant rocks, sprawling views, and the two lakes along the way. Emerald Lake gets a lot of the glory at the end point of this hike because it’s a beautiful alpine lake directly at the foot of Flattop Mountain and Hallett Peak, but Dream Lake is probably our favorite as it’s a bit further from those peaks, which provides a more photogenic perspective. It’s also a bit less crowded there than Emerald, which is where everyone stops to rest, eat lunch, and enjoy the view.
Planning the Session Itinerary
As much as we’d love to, we certainly can’t cover everything in one session, so we’ll discuss some options with you to see which sort of locations resonate most with you and try to combine a few during our session time. We never want to try to pack too many stops in our session, because it’s a better experience for everyone to be able to take our time working the locations we choose than to rush around and try to do too many. The primary factor for us in planning is the light. We prefer the golden hour leading up to sunset, so we always work our planning back then, so if we’re doing a 2 hour session, we plan to meet up 2 hours before sunset. Check out this link for more information on planning the engagement session!
We generally choose from 3 different combinations. If we’re doing a hike, like Emerald Lake, we plan to focus just on that adventure and shoot at a variety of scenes along the hike. If we’re doing a driving loop, Rocky NP essentially forks in two directions from Estes Park. Entering in the Beaver Meadows Entrance, we can work Beaver Meadows, then continue south to Moraine Park, then perhaps finish at Sprague Lake. We may do these in a different order depending on the way the lighting is looking. The second fork leads us northwest up US-36 toward the Alpine Visitor Center. We may start from the Fall River Road or Beaver Meadows Entrance, then make our way up to Rainbow Curve, finishing at Forest Canyon Overlook.
Know that we’re always open for collaboration, so if you see a view along the way that calls to you, we’d be happy to stop and work that scene! Since we can’t control the weather, the clouds, the crowds, or the lighting, we’re always adapting along the session, so if things don’t end up exactly according to the plan we come up with ahead of time, know that these modifications and changes will likely result in better images!
