Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Day 11 - Rocky Mountain National Park

Day 11 (June 5) -- We started out the day with a huge breakfast at the Big Horn Restaurant in Estes Park, CO.  This is where the KOA lady said the locals eat.  She was right in that is was a great restaurant with huge portions.  Erin and Bow got matching shirts and they decided to wear them today, so they looked like twins all day (and ordered mostly the same food all day as well).  



After breakfast we drove through Rocky Mountain National Park and it was phenomenal!  I had not heard much about this park and I think it is the prettiest national park I've ever been to!!! I'd rate it higher than Yellowstone.  One of the best things about it is driving the Trail Ridge Road.  This road takes several hours to drive because you wind up over the top of the Rocky Mountains. 

Snow drift on the side of the road at the summit





Bow and Erin out in the wind while we hiked at the top of the park at 12,000+ ft.
Bow in front of Mushroom Rock

I even took a picture with my phone of when the GPS said we reached over 12,000 ft.  David said it was exhilarating to drive this curvy road with sheer vertical drops on either side as we climb up over the mountains.  We were lucky that the road was completely clear because it is usually not open until the first week of June, but they had lighter than normal snow in the winter, so we didn't see hardly any snow while we were up there.  Although Pike's Peak was fun, this was much better!  We drove up above the treeline and then though alpine tundra.  We got to see several yellow-bellied marmuts up close.

Our top altitude

 After spending several hours driving and eating lunch up at the cafeteria in the Alpine Visitors Center near the summit, we came down the other side of the park, crossing the continental divide in the process.  After we emerged on the other side of the park we wished we had planned to spend another day there since we still had around 7 hours of driving to go to get to Moab, Utah.  After we came down off the mountains (well, back down to around 9,000 ft) and drove through all of the ski resorts that were on the freeway (Copper Mountain, Vale, etc.).


Yellow-bellied marmuts up close
 


 By the time we crossed the border into Utah it was dark and we couldn't tell what the terrain was at all.  There was a full moon, so you could see vague shapes on the side of the road which could have been mountains, but you really couldn't tell much about them at all.  Then we had to get off the the freeway and drive a half hour south to get to Moab.  I had called that morning to check on our reservations for KOA for that night (to see if we could get a cabin because we anticipated a late arrival), and I found out that I hadn't even made a reservation for that night (oops - guess I forgot a place!).  Luckily, she did have a cabin available which was nice because we didn't want to have to set up a tent in the dark.  We've discovered that cabins are much nicer for 1 night stays because it almost isn't worth all of the work to set up and take down the tent for one night.
Colorado meadow


We got into Moab around 11 pm (ate dinner at a McDonald's in Rifle, CO) and all we could tell about it was that it was sandy.  It wasn't quite as nice as previous cabins.  It had the same layout (queen bed one room and two sets of bunk beds in the other room (we like it better when the queen bed is in the back room and the kids are in the front room, but that only has happened one time thus far -- in Albuquerque).  But, this didn't have a ceiling fan and did have a very noisy old air conditioner right by our heads (which we ran until we went to bed and then turned it off because we couldn't sleep with it on).


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