ESTES PARK, Colo. — This summer, Koren Nydick was scrolling Facebook when she stopped at a photo.
It was of a lake from back in Colorado, back at Rocky Mountain National Park, where she serves as chief of resource stewardship. She knew the lake, Haiyaha, an Indigenous word roughly translating to “rock.” But now the lake looked different. The color was unlike anything she had ever seen at the park.
Nydick happened to be on vacation in France at the time. This was a sight she would’ve expected in this glacial region, not back at her home mountains.
“It was ironic that I was in the Alps at the time, and I had just seen a tarn that color,” Nydick recalled. “But when I saw that (photo), it made sense.”
In the video above, watch a rockfall in June in Chaos Canyon at Rocky Mountain National Park.
To anyone less scientifically rounded yet familiar with Lake Haiyaha’s former blue — the typical hue of Colorado’s alpine lakes — the sudden, milky green might’ve startled. They might’ve been like one Instagrammer from last month, whose post included pictures from three other popular lakes at Rocky Mountain National Park. “Lake Haiyaha is the turquoise one,” the post observed. “We had no idea it would look so much different from the others.”
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