Having driven through the town of Estes Park the day before, we today decided to return and explore the community itself – as one might imagine, timed entry tickets for Rocky Mountain NP were impossible to come by on Labor Day weekend, but there were numerous hiking options outside the park boundary we expected to attempt once we were done in town. Despite arriving midmorning on a Saturday, we were surprised to find easy parking, and we spent several hours wandering through the many shops and negotiating the crowds – there was an arts and crafts fair going on, and that likely added to the area’s congestion which seemed to get worse as the day went on. By midafternoon, we’d seen everything we wanted to see in Estes Park, so we drove a short distance eastward and into Roosevelt NF, turning right onto a dirt road that provides access to several campgrounds. Our destination was the trailhead for Kruger Rock, a prominent outcrop offering beautiful views over the region and reached via a 1.8-mile trail with about 800′ of gain – the AllTrails reviews were great, and we figured to be able to finish by sunset. We found the TH easily enough and started out just before 4pm, walking first westward up a moderate incline through open, grassy meadows. It didn’t take us long to reach the first viewpoint, a saddle on the ridge ahead from which we could see the entirety of Estes Park and much of the national park beyond. At the saddle we turned southward, climbing gently at first and then more steeply, eventually emerging onto a plateau of sorts below Kruger Rock. The scenery had been great to this point, but we found ourselves in a sizeable burn area that was less than a year old – AllTrails had not mentioned this. We traversed the western foot of the rock’s lower slopes and then began a steep set of switchbacks that took us up through the burn and into a thin layer of unburnt terrain just below the summit. The rock itself had loomed over us most of the hike to this point, its sheer faces not revealing an obvious route to the top – here however, from the south, a moderately narrow cleft appeared, and we scrambled through this opening for perhaps the last 30 vertical feet and topped out. The views in all directions were as advertised, both expansive and impressive. We hung out for a bit, enjoying both the warm sunshine and a somewhat cooling breeze, greeting a large family and their dogs (who both negotiated the scramble with guidance) who showed up as we were about to leave. The return was a simple retracing of our steps – the meadows near the trailhead were in shadow now, but our hopes for seeing deer or elk feeding on the grass went unfulfilled. A really nice hike, this one.