Upper Beaver Meadows and Trail Ridge Road Engagement Photos in Estes Park | Alyssa + Bank

Being Alyssa and Bank’s Rocky Mountain National Park Engagement Photographer was for sure a journey to accomplish! These two wonderful human beings actually live on the East Coast, in New Jersey, but are having a wedding in Vail Colorado in 2020. They are adventurous hearts and love exploring in the mountains so when they saw a previous engagement session I had done on Trail Ridge Road in Estes Park Colorado they knew that it would make for the perfect backdrop for their mountain engagement session! Little did any of us know we would have one of the snowiest springs that Colorado has seen in years. Like clockwork for the past as many years as I can remember Trail Ridge Road has opened on Memorial Day weekend, so we figured we were for sure in the clear when we scheduled for the two of them to fly out to Colorado for their destination engagement session in Rocky Mountain National Park, but Mother Nature had other plans. Trail Ridge Road did not open on memorial day weekend, in fact there were 18′ of snow (yes, feet – not inches) on the road that weekend. Thankfully, Colorado is a gorgeous state so we set our backup plan in motion to take their engagement photos on a different Colorado mountain pass! By some actual real life miracle they plowed trail ridge road and it opened for the season at sunrise the morning of their engagement session! Alyssa and Bank booked it over from Vail for their evening engagement photos and we were all thrilled to set our original plan back in motion!

As we passed the fee station and entered Rocky Mountain National Park it started drizzling, then raining, then pouring, then hailing. It came out of nowhere, but then it left as fast as it came. As we pulled in to Upper Beaver Meadow in Rocky Mountain National Park (the first stop for their engagement photos) the hail suddenly stopped and a gorgeous, bright rainbow popped up in the sky right over a meadow that must’ve been filled with at least 100 elk. I literally screamed out loud in my car, pulled off on the shoulder and FLEW out of the drivers seat with my camera in my hand. Alyssa and Bank ran out in to the field and we got to start their Estes Park Engagement session in the most epic way possible – with a rainbow dipping right in to the mountains and wildlife in the distance! The rainbow lasted for less than 5 actual minutes, but it set the tone for one of the most beautiful and wild weathered engagement sessions I have ever photographed.

We ventured our way through some other areas in lower Rocky Mountain National Park and then headed up Trail Ridge Road, on opening day, to continue taking their engagement pictures! There were some parts on the drive up where the snow on the sides of the road was actually twice the height of my car, but my Subaru Forester is my spirit animal and had my troubles booking it up the mountain for our next epic stop on the engagement photos train! When we arrived, my goosebumps had goosebumps on goosebumps. It was stunning! Alyssa and Bank ventured across the mountainside so effortlessly that you would have no idea they spend their day to day in a bustling city. They are definitely mountain people to their core, it was amazing. We stayed on top of the mountain as long as humanly possible until a storm started to roll in and we could feel and see our hair standing up (when you’re at 14,000 ft and lightning is about to strike you get the heck out of there!) so we all hopped in our cars, drove below the storm and continued taking photos in the rain. It was like The Notebook, but better, because Alyssa and Bank are world’s cuter than the love story in that movie!

We wrapped up their session at Sheep Lakes after the sun had already dipped beneath the mountains and Rocky Mountain National Park was still and quiet. No less than two minutes after we left Rocky Mountain National Park thunder cracked and the sky opened up and it started pouring monsoon style for the entire two hour drive home. It’s like Mother Nature created this beautiful little window of time for Alyssa and Bank to have the most magical engagement session ever before she went and did her thing.

I am so excited to photograph their 2020 wedding in Vail Colorado at Donovan Pavilion!