Living Lab Exploring Estes Park

This episode we'll discover a side to Rocky Mountain
National Park that most people don’t even know exists. Beyond
the beautiful trails and mountains, the park is a Living Laboratory of science. There are about a hundred individual scientific research projects going on in the park at any one time, some of the most cutting edge ecology, biology and conservation in the world is done right here. That work is helping to protect the Estes
Park region today and into the future.

Rocky Mountain National Park may feel isolated from the cities and industry of the plains, but it’s not. It’s part of a complex interconnected system in which every piece is dependent on one another. And to understand how that works, and why it’s important, we’re going to hike up to more than 10,000-ft to one of the most remote research stations in the country to find out about an experiment that has been going on in the park for the last 38 years. It’s one of the longest running ecological research
studies in the world and it’s changing the way we understand
the park, the plains and even our own relationship to the wild
spaces we love. Welcome to Rocky Mountain National Park’s
Living Laboratory.