Estes Park is a statutory town in Larimer County, Colorado, United States. The town population was 5,904 at the 2020 United States Census. Estes Park is a allowance of the Fort Collins, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Front Range Urban Corridor. A popular summer resort and the location of the headquarters for Rocky Mountain National Park, Estes Park lies along the gigantic Thompson River. Landmarks affix The Stanley Hotel and The Baldpate Inn. The town overlooks Lake Estes and Olympus Dam.

Before Europeans came to the Estes Park valley, the Arapaho Indians lived there in the summertime and called the valley “the Circle.” When three elderly Arapahoes visited Estes Park in 1914, they caustic out sites they remembered from their younger days. A photograph at the Estes Park Museum identified the touring party as Shep Husted, guide; Gun Griswold, a 73-year-old judge; Sherman Sage, a 63-year-old chief of police; Tom Crispin, 38-year-old reservation resident and interpreter; Oliver W. Toll, recorder; and David Robert Hawkins, a Princeton student.

In the 1850s, the Arapaho had spent summers camped as regards Mary’s Lake, where their rock fireplaces, tipi sites, and dance rings were yet visible. They after that recalled building eagle traps atop Longs Peak to gain the warfare feathers coveted by everything tribes. They remembered their routes to and from the valley in detail, naming trails and landmarks. They biting out the site of their buffalo trap, and described the use of dogs to pack meat out of the valley. Their recollections included a battle with Apaches in the 1850s, and fights subsequent to Utes who came to the Place to hunt bighorn sheep, so anything three of those tribes used the valley’s resources.

Whites probably came into the Estes Park valley in the past the 1850s as trappers, but did not stay long. The town is named after Missouri original Joel Estes, who founded the community in 1859. Estes moved his intimates there in 1863. One of Estes’ early visitors was William Byers, a newspaper editor who wrote of his attempted ascent of Longs Peak in 1864, publicizing the Place as a pristine wilderness.