Rose and I headed into Rocky Mountain National park for a couple nights of camping, snowshoeing and hiking. We knew it being week in March there would be very few visitors, so finding a camping spot was no problem, actually we there was only one other family camping in the same campground. The first night we arrived just in time to setup camp, it was very windy and the stove kept getting blowing out but we eventually managed to make dinner and get the tent up.
The next day we did several snowshoe treks starting from Bear Lake, Sprague Lake and Glacier Basin trail heads. Unfortunately the trails were all poorly marked, so we were limited to following the tracks from other skiers and snowshoes. Most of these tracks veered off the trails and then turned around so it was very difficult to do a lengthy hike. We managed to put enough of them together to make the day enjoyable. That evening we struggled to make dinner as it was even windier than the day before. Afterwards we were just sitting in the car reading, when I noticed out of the car something moving. I looked up and walking no further than 10 ft form the car was a Wolf! Then he just wandered off into the adjacent field, about 10 mins later another one came by! Very cool. We then headed over in the same direction to find a herd of about 5 elk, probably what they were checking out.
Friday we woke up, paked up camp and headed for Deer Mountain. Deer Mountain’s summit stands at only 10013 ft, small in comparison to the 14,000 and 13,000 ft mountains that surrounded us, but Rose and I were looking for a quick hike we could finish before lunch. Everything started off alright, and we covered the first 2 miles to the summit in just 90 minutes. However the last mile took us another hour or more to complete. The top of the mountain was covered in a thin snow. Since we neglected to bring out snowshoes we kept post holing through and we had to crawl and semi-walk our way up. A couple of times I gave rose the option to turn back, but to my surprise she was determined to summit. We finally did and were rewarded with some amazing views of the surrounding mountains under relatively clear skies. We headed back down the mountain worn but happy. We stopped at Nepal's Cafe, for lunch in Estes Park on our way to Fort Collins.
Photo Album: FTF day 37-39 Rocky Mountain National Park
No comments:
Post a Comment