The Post Chicken & Beer – Estes Park, Colorado
In 1974 prolific author Stephen King and his wife Tabitha spent a night in Room 217 of The Stanley, a a 140-room Colonial Revival hotel in Estes Park, about five miles from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. The hotel staff was preparing to close the hotel for the season so the Kings found themselves the only guests in the place. King wrote about the experience on his website: “Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect—maybe the archetypical—setting for a ghost story. That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in the chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.” As you ascend the hill leading to The Stanley, you’re struck at the grandeur and immensity of the complex. It’s hard to imagine Jack Nicholson demolishing a door with an axe,…