“We're used to a step being pretty quiet, but you hear how much noise it actually makes in vibration underground,” he said.

He wants more people to think about what they’re hearing. After spending two weeks at the park, he had one main observation.

“It’s just so busy, and there's so much constant road noise,” he said. “Not that that's bad. People should come and enjoy it, but just thinking about what impact does that have on the soundscape?”

Rocky Mountain’s picturesque landscapes, unique biodiversity, and close proximity to Denver have made it the nation's fifth-most-visited park, with about four million visitors annually in the past decade.

“It's hard to disperse people away from that park,” said Tracy Coppola with the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). “It's such a crown jewel.”

While visitors are enjoying Rocky Mountain, they’re also leaving a detrimental footprint. The park needs to spend more than $200 million on repairs and upgrades — the most of any national park in Colorado. The money would be used for trail maintenance, additional parking, and sewer improvements.

Additionally, before the timed entry system was put into place, Coppola said the public was not able to have "rich interactions" with rangers and the overall esteem of the park was impacted by overcrowding.

Now, park officials have worked to manage the influx of people with the new system. Even with the increased crowds, the environmental impact remains low, and Coppola believes the system has made for a better visitation experience overall.

But this is not a "one and done" system, Coppola said. The park is still adapting and it’s a difficult balancing act.

“We want these places to continue to be celebrated and accessible, but then we also want to protect the park,” she said.

“Artists like Thomas Moran and William Henry Jackson actually produced artwork that helped inspire Washington D.C. to establish parks like Yellowstone and other early national parks,” said Shari Orr, the program manager of the Volunteers-In-Parks program with the National Park Service, which oversees the Artist-In-Residence program.

The relationship between artists and political leaders continued through the years, leading to the creation of Artist-In-Residence programs at 50 parks across the country.

Rocky Mountain’s program is one of the oldest, beginning in 1984. Selected artists stay at a cabin in the park for two weeks. They host community programs, work on their art, and engage with the public.

“We want to help people understand more about the resources that we're protecting, whether that's natural spaces, cultural spaces, historic spaces, and we want them to walk away with a meaning that's personal to them,” Orr explained.

It doesn’t matter if the artist makes quilts, creates a comedy sketch, or writes a recipe book. Orr said such creative mediums amplify a message of conservation in ways that are more transformative than reading a park sign.

“You're really going from visitor to, like, a steward of this resource and of this special place,” she said. “(We hope) that they're walking away hopefully a more informed person and maybe a better person because of those reflections that they've had.”

That’s what Joe Norman wants to do. He’s a Loveland-based steel sculptor who was also selected for a residency.

Many of his works feature two pictures or words that are mixed together but distinct from a certain angle. From one side, you may see the word “rage.” Walk to the other side, and you see the word “hope.”

“If I had to summarize it (my art) in one word, it would be the word, ‘And,’” he said. “I like the idea of making sculptures that have more than one thing in them, to say, there's a spectrum in this idea.”

Meet the sound artist who's exploring the symphony of nature at Rocky Mountain National Park