Colorado's Front Range

This will be a catch-up post covering a few days along the front range in Colorado. We left off at Trinidad Lake in Colorado. The following day we were headed to Lake Pueblo to camp. An old friend suggested we detour past Bishop Castle in the mountains southwest of Pueblo, CO. So we did. I will save you the details, but the owner of the place, Jim Bishop, was a bit of an eccentric fellow. You can read his family accounting of the place at their website. https://www.bishopcastle.org/. 

Basically, he built (over many, many decades) a stone and iron castle. No one lives there - it's not a habitable structure. It's more art than it is practical. He apparently worked on it most weekends, but is about 80 now, and his son won't let him work on it any longer. He does not care for rules, as the many signs posted on the property will attest. The place is open all the time for people to stop and tour at their own risk. There were a few dozen vehicles of tourists there on a Thursday late morning. As we drove away, Elena and I were both thinking about how he could have used his talent to build interesting, but habitable structures.

Bishop Castle

We had a nice camp site at Lake Pueblo - an easy walk to the water. We watched some monstrous thunderstorms to our NE, but it was clear over us. She inflated her paddleboard, and we got it to the water, but the wind was blowing at over 25mph making it difficult to paddle. She swam around in the lake instead, and we carried the board back to the camper. A short time later, new cells developed over us, including a strong hail storm. It only got to marble size, but it was quite loud. 

UL: Trinidad Lake; Others: Lake Pueblo

The next morning we drove in early to Colorado Springs and visited Garden of the Gods. We arrived about 8AM and the crowd was very small. It grew rapidly over the next hour. We started in the popular central garden area. On our way out, a large group of teenagers gathered around to pet Bebop. They were lined up a few people deep for their turn. She always draws attention when we are hiking.

Bebop always the center of attention

We decided to try and shake the crowd by visiting the Siamese Twin rock feature, as it required a small hike to reach. There were less than a dozen people there, which enforces our observation that crowds dwindle exponentially with distance from the parking lots. This theory was again validated when we later drove down past Balanced Rock. This feature sits just feet from the parking lot and there were a several hundred people gathered around trying to take photos in front of it - from every angle. We drove on past.

Garden of the Gods

We went to the Red Rock Open Space in the late afternoon and got a couple miles of hiking in before another round of afternoon storms chased us back to the camper van. There were only a few other people there. We had some heavy rain and a tiny bit of hail at our campground that evening. 

The next morning, the skies were clear, and we tackled the 19-mile horizontal drive (and about 1 1/2 miles vertical) up Sun Mountain (Pikes Peak). As we approached the entry gate, we saw about 18 old Ford Model A cars lined up to go in. They were all meticulously restored. We saw one Model A break down in the road at about mile 15 and another broke down near the bottom as we departed. Overall, their success rate was not bad for a 90-year-old vehicle. Our camper van handled the nearly 8,000 foot vertical climb nicely.

Mountaintop Bebop

As we reached the top at about 9AM, we saw the mountain begin to perform its weather making show. It was a sunny morning, in the upper 40’s with fairly light winds. As those winds blew across the top, they created negative pressure and updrafts of the leeward side. This drew valley air upward, and the moisture began to condense into clouds. We watched the swirling clouds forming directly in front of us. By the time we got down in the early afternoon, some had built into thunderstorms nearby.

Up top for us and the caravan of Ford Model A cars going up

Sun Mountain (Pikes Peak) top and bottom

We drove to the Florissant Fossil National Monument next. This area had a very large amount of petrified redwood trees. Much of it was removed before it became a monument, including an entire stump that Walt Disney took to Disneyland for display. They have excavated around some of the other enormous stumps that were just below the surface. As we arrived, we had to dash into the visitor center to avoid another heavy thunderstorm. This was three days of storms in a row, but we missed the hail with this one. After the storm cleared, we walked around the observation trails. The visitor center has an excellent display of a rich trove of fossils of plants and animals that have been found at the site.  It was a great look at the ecosystem from about 34 million years ago when a warm and wet climate allowed giant redwood trees to grow at 8,000 feet elevation in what is now Colorado. Bonus Points: The visitor center was also similar to our house with SIP walls, solar water heating, solar electric, and natural daylighting.

 

On day six of our trip we visited the Dinosaur Ridge in Golden. This is the site of a number of 100 million year old fossils and bones. In 1877 several dinosaurs were discovered at Dinosaur Ridge, including Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus. After a couple of miles of hiking we headed to the Museum of Earth Science at the Colorado School of Mines. An amazing display of geology - many rocks. Then we checked into our creekside campground in Golden and watched approximately one million people tubing in the adjacent creek on an Sunday afternoon. We walked to town and met my longtime friend Lara Wallentine Hussain for dinner. 

 

Fossil Ridge in Golden, CO

Clear Creek in Golden, CO

 Next up, Rocky Mountain National Park. 

- Paul