rocky mountain national park

the view from our campsite

Paul's parents arrived on Saturday. We're going on a nine night camping trip with them to the Four Corners area, so we've been busy buying some gear and two weekends ago spent a night in the Rocky Mountain National Park to check it all out. We took our summer sleeping bags and spent a cold night. Tim started out in his own 'room' in the tent but woke and joined us. The body heat was welcome even if he did keep us up tossing and turning. It took us about 1.5 hours to get to our campsite, the last one available. The pine beetles have killed thousands of trees. They've cut them all down in this campsite and it looks like a moonscape. The trees become prime forest fire material after the beetles are through with them, so they cut them when they can. Environmentalists would like them to be left to burn.


our campsite sans trees - the stumps are evidence that this was thickly forested


our new family tent

After setting up camp, we took a short walk to nearby Sprague Lake. There's a well maintained path all the way around it. We walked through the forest from our campsite to get there and encountered no one until we arrived at the shore. There's a parking lot on the opposite shore from where we arrived, and there were loads of people taking advantage of the warm weather. It was windy, but Paul did some fishing whenever we found a sheltered area. I had to keep a close eye on Tim who has no concept of the end of the land and the beginning of the water and will happily march into the lake. He loves to throw rocks and sticks into the water but has to get very close to actually hit water.


sprague lake

Paul used our new camp stove to grill lovely steaks. We ate rather late and went to bed soon after the sun set.

The next morning Paul and Tim went for another walk to the lake and I buried myself in both our sleeping bags and got some sleep. Paul cooked up a yummy breakfast and then it was time to break camp. It was windy again and dark storm clouds were moving in quickly.


cooking breakfast on the new camp stove

We drove uphill to Bear Lake and planned to walk around it. We walked from the car to the shore, got a quick look, and watched the snow move across to where we were standing. It was more like small snow balls then snowflakes, but they were soft. We took that a sign to go home and saw a small heard of elk on the way out of the park. When we got out of the mountains and into Loveland, the first city on the plains, the clouds dumped about 15 minutes of hail on us. We pulled off under some trees and watched it come down.


hail storm

It was nice to camp out again and we're both impatient now for the trip with Jenny and Neville. They are here for three weeks and we're making the trip in the second week.