Rocky Mountain National Park

For outdoors people in Colorado, Rocky Mountain National Park holds a special significance. At almost three hundred thousand acres, it’s one of the biggest contiguous parcels of wilderness in the US. And those hundreds of thousands of acres of park are punctuated with stunning variety. Elevations in Rocky Mountain National Park range from just over seven thousand feet above sea level to over fourteen thousand. So you’ve got everything from lush valleys and lakes, populated by trout and moose, all the way up to alpine environments, frequented by mountain goats and bighorn sheep. And visitors can experience all of that diversity from the over 350 miles of trail that wind through the park.

Rocky Mountain National Park always held a special place in James Niehues’s heart, as evidenced by this painting of the park he completed in 1996. In this piece, he captures the sprawling expanse of the park, from Longs Peak, all the way down to the lake. The saturated greens and browns are an exciting contrast to his winter ski maps, and this piece captures the scale and beauty of this massive park in a unique way that anyone who has visited is sure to appreciate.