SPURRED TO NEW HEIGHTS HORSEBACK RIDES SHOW THE REAL ROCKIES.

Byline: Eric Noland Travel Editor

ESTES PARK, Colo. - There are myriad diversions to choose from in this portal community on the east side of Rocky Mountain National Park. Very few of them, however, have anything whatsoever to do with a natural experience.

Visitors to Estes Park may avail themselves of go-kart tracks, a rock museum, miniature golf, not one but two shops selling Christmas gewgaws year-round, corkscrew plastic slides and numerous merchants that dispense fudge, taffy and ice-cream cones.

You'll also find any number of vintage tourist cottages that innkeepers will cheerfully rent to you for $100 a night.

But here's a way to slip away from this tourist bazaar and still enjoy the natural beauty of the eastern flank of the Rockies: an overnight horseback trip.

Priced at $150, which includes dinner, breakfast, a guide and an all-day ride in the mountains, the offering by Sombrero Ranch Riding Stables in Estes Park proved a pleasant alternative to a night in town.

The 1,000-acre ranch spreads out across forested hillsides at the east end of town, alongside a stub of national park territory and the sprawling Roosevelt National Forest. Guests provide the camping gear they require - tent, sleeping bag, pad - which is ferried in to the camping ground ahead of you. (Equipment can be rented in town if you didn't bring any along.)

Then it's into the saddle and off to the mountains.

As you traverse a ridge, you'll gain terrific views of the perpetually snow-capped peaks of the national park to the west. The wind in the tops of the pines provides a special music. In late spring, the aspens were a radiant light green, their leaves shimmering in the wind.

We first rode to the camping ground, which is in a small, wooded valley on ranch property. It seemed to have everything we and the horses needed: a corral, a storage shed for hay and tack, an outhouse, a fire ring, a storage box for our gear and a steel-constructed bear box for our snacks.

Soon after we made camp, a thunderstorm rolled in - they arrive in the afternoons with almost clocklike precision in the national park and its environs. The last place you want to be when the lightning starts is atop a ridge and astride a horse, so we were thankful to ride it out in the relative shelter of the camp.

On these overnight trips, meals are taken at the ranch's cookout grounds, about an hour's ride over a ridge from the camp. The campers piggy- back on the special dinner and breakfast rides also offered by the ranch. The fare is hearty stuff: grilled steaks, beans and potatoes for dinner, pancakes, sausage and eggs for breakfast.

The riding itself is pretty tame, a single-file plodding walk common to such ventures. We had plenty of open country that seemed prime for a good run, but the pace never varied. But the point was to enjoy the serenity and the views, and this mode of transport was akin to hiking - with someone else doing the work.

The highlight was the onset of evening, as we sat around a campfire (something the ranch can no longer do this summer because of the extreme fire risk throughout Colorado). Wrangler Zoe Taylor talked wistfully of her native England, while cohort Jeff Saari told of his upbringing in the wilds of Alaska. We played cards. Saari offered a cigar (it would have been unneighborly to decline to join him). And when the clouds broke up, the stars began to pop out overhead.

About the only disappointment was that we hadn't really strayed that far from civilization. Because the stables have to be convenient to tourist centers, our long, circuitous ride to the camping ground found us in a valley that was perhaps no more than two or three miles from one of Estes Park's main feeder roads, Highway 34. I was sorry to discern its distant hum as I bedded down in my tent.

But there were other sounds that came to supersede it: the whistling of wind in the pines, the stamping and snorting of the horses in the darkness, the song of forest birds just before dawn.

In such a setting, the tourist cottages of town seemed far, far away.

--Sombrero Ranch is located on Highway 34, two miles east of Estes Park. In addition to its overnight pack trip, the ranch offers one-hour, two- hour, half-day and all-day rides, plus breakfast and dinner rides. Information: [phone]; www.sombrero.com.

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The peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park greet riders from Sombrero Ranch in Colorado.

Eric Noland/Travel Editor