Colorado

Every year, we go on a floating/camping trip somewhere around southern MO or NW Arkansas. This year, however, we decided to trade that out for a hiking/camping trip in Colorado. Definitely more travel time involved, but I was optimistic the mountains would make up for it.

Unfortunately, I came down with some (not serious) health issues before the trip. This included vertigo/dizziness. The nine-hour drive to Denver was pretty miserable for me, and by the time I was out of the car and at higher altitude than I am used to, my vertigo was the worst it had been in months.

But our AirBnB in the Capitol Hill district was fantastic, so I sucked it up and tried to enjoy myself.

We were a short walk to one of the vegetarian restaurants I wanted to try, so we headed to City O City for dinner and a couple drinks. We had some awesome vegan buffalo wings, soft pretzel, street tacos, and an oyster mushroom po’boy because I don’t know when to stop when I have so many options. Once we were finished stuffing our faces, we stopped by a store for some beers and headed back to our apartment, where we all sat out on the patio and enjoyed the beautiful weather and hung out.

The next morning, I woke up to the room spinning which really freaked me out and put me in a not-so-great mood for our first full day of the trip. I was considering turning back around and heading back to Kansas, or maybe letting Anthony stay but me find a flight home, but the dizziness subsided a bit, and we went to brunch at another veggie restaurant I was looking forward to, Watercourse. The nachos were life-changing, and my “chicken” and waffles were pretty tasty as well, and by the end of it, I was feeling a little better.

But then it was time to get back in our car for the journey to Rocky Mountain National Park. This time I had snow-capped mountains in front of me to keep my spirits up. We passed through Estes Park, bought our national park pass, and made it to our campground at Moraine Park. They gave us the bear speech with direct orders to store any food items, drink items, or scented items in our bear locker or the trunk of our car and then handed us a map and ushered us on. Anthony stayed behind at the gate to wait for Cole and Zach since we didn’t have phone service, and I drove on to our site to set up camp.

We had a hike-to spot, which meant that our site was a few minutes’ walk from where I had to park the car. This made setting up camp by myself a bit annoying, but the privacy and views from our site made up for it.

We had planned on going on a hike that afternoon, but I wasn’t really feeling up to it, so instead, we went on a little roadtrip up Trail Ridge Road. I’ve heard the drive is spectacular, but the rain and fog formed around us, so we weren’t able to see a whole lot. (Is it really an Anthony and Brenna vacation if we don’t have views ruined by fog at least once?)

We made our way back to camp for dinner. The rain had died down and was just a slight drizzle, so we started working on our campfire. As soon as we managed to get it started, it was raining again… of course. Anthony held an umbrella over me and the fire so that I could cook our veggie brats. It wasn’t the easy dinner I had planned on having, but it worked out in the end.

Once the rain finally moved on, we had some pleasant lighting and weather for me to wander around and check out our surroundings.

We managed to keep the fire going the rest of the evening while we sat around it and hung out until it was time to put all our stuff up and head to our tents for bed.

We were up at the crack of dawn the next morning, listening to the elk bugling while we got ready for our hike.

We drove to the Bear Lake trailhead. I had planned on doing the Four Lakes loop hike, but when I mentioned this to the ranger there, he encouraged us not to because of a bunch of snow and mud in parts of it. So instead, we joined the masses (not really, we were there at like 6:30am, so the crowds were quite small at that point) and did the hike to Dream Lake and Emerald Lake.

The trail offered lots of beautiful forested views as well as plenty of wildlife sighting.

We made it to Dream Lake which was obviously stunning. We rested there for a while and then continued our climb.

Finally, we made it to Emerald Lake. We sat here, relaxed, and took it all in for some time. There was snow all around us, but we were pleasantly warm in the sunshine after hiking.

At one point, we noticed a couple of crazy people hiking along the side of the snowy mountain way up high, which I just can’t imagine.

We ate some snacks and then decided we had hogged the best views long enough, so we turned back around.

The sun was higher up, casting a different light on everything we had just seen.

We came across so many more people on the way down and were very happy that we had started as early as we did.  We went back to camp to make some much-needed coffee, eat lunch, change our clothes, and relax some.

After that, we decided to try Trail Ridge Road again with the hopes that we’d actually be able to see it this time. Which was the case, but it did start raining on us again after awhile.

We had time to kill, so we stopped by a visitor center and then went in to Estes Park to wander around and shop. I don’t understand how they have so many t-shirt shops in such a small radius, but we went into one after another after another until we had all succeeded in buying something.

Then we went to the Barrel to sit out on the patio and have a couple beers. We were in a severe thunderstorm warning at this point, but it barely sprinkled and we only heard a bit of thunder. Being from tornado alley, we laughed at this version of a “severe thunderstorm” but I wasn’t complaining.

Zach and I both ended up not feeling real great, likely having some altitude sickness, so we went back to camp so that we could lie down for awhile.

The weather was much kinder that evening, so we had an easier time relaxing around our campfire.

All we had left the next day was tearing down camp and making that long, awful ride back to Kansas City.

I can’t say it was the most successful trip I’ve ever had, but that’s no fault of Colorado’s, and any time spent in the mountains is obviously worth it.