Steamboat Lake State Park

Sometimes when picking a campground you just miss. Steamboat Lake State Park was a miss for me. It was too exposed and lacked amenities unless you had a boat. My pics are misleading. It has the world's most boring trail. In fact we both termed it that separately. Oh well, can't win them all. I would rather have stayed two days each at the previous two campgrounds and skipped this one completely. Unfortunately I booked it for two nights because it had electric.

However the drive to the park was beautiful and we got to see the horses at a local stable crossing the road.

Our site.

Another site.

A better part of the world's most boring trail.

Sunshine tries to balance on a log.

View over the lake.

View from our site.

Another view from our site.

Hindsight is 20/20. I would never have booked this boring campground.

Meadows Campground on Rabbit Ears Pass

 The Meadows was more to my liking. Great trees.

Our selected site.

Trees in every direction.

There were only a few other campers. We all selected tree sites.

Picnic table at our site.

Map of campground.

Campground road.

Another site.

Were the unit at the back of the pic.

Sunshine navigates a down tree.

Pretty trail but there was only one.

A little snow on the trail.

Blossom loves to explore.

Sunshine wants a drink from the stream.

Snow in July was all around.

Blossom on the trail.

Site more out in the open.

Road to the campground.

Not sure how nervous I should be about the hunters.

The meadow the campground is named after.

We saw four moose at this campground but since I didn't want to get stomped I did not stay around to get pictures. However, my husband did (take pictures, not get stomped).

We did not see the dogs mentioned below. Loved the sign that told people not to hit or throw things at the dogs. Hate to think that people did which is why they had to post the sign.

Do not disturb the dogs.

This was the campground where I woke up cold and asked what is this? Cold in my RV? We checked out the furnace and a rocker switch had some grit in it that prevented it from igniting. We rocked the switch a few times and the furnace was back to working.

Descending pass into Steamboat Springs.

Dumont Lake

There was some beautiful scenery on the drive from Wyoming, thru CO up to Rabbit Ears Pass

We had two potential campgrounds for the second night. The first was Dumont Lake.

 It was a little more alpine meadow than I was looking for so we took a look around. This would have been the view from our site.

 Blossom would have enjoyed the snow.

The lake was pretty and had some trails. But we didn't stay.

Headed to Dinosaur National Monument - first stop Vedauwoo

I am so lucky. This fabulous camping spot is 2 hrs from our house and we will be back. One night was not enough. The campground featured dramatic rocks, great hiking trails, an abundance of wildflowers, widely spaced sites and trees. The night sky was phenomenal. One of the best I've seen. The stars were all twinkling wildly, likely because of upper atmosphere disturbance but it made it all the more special.

The campground road.

Everyone is pleased with the site.

Blossom investigates our picnic table.

Trail from our site into the woods.

The dogs enjoy the shady trail. There were many mosquitoes.

Map of the area.

One of the many inane signs I saw during this trip. It became a hobby to take pictures of them.

Our camping spot. A moose came out from behind the big rock you see just before we left.

Sunshine checking out another site.

We love these trails say the dogs.

The moose that crossed our site just before we left. He ambled through most of the campground.

Big trip to Dinosaur National Monument - trip planning

We had a two week vacation planned but had done no research on where to go or what to see. We had discussed a rural CO trip at forest service campgrounds but I like to see some informative sites like national parks where they have lots of info so we settled on Dinosaur National Monument as our destination despite it likely being too hot.

Two days before leaving we started seriously planning a route and making reservations. We got July 4th and 5th at the monument so everything else revolved around that.  We wanted a route that didn't take I-70 from Denver into the mountains so decided to go up to Wyoming before heading back into CO and over Rabbit Ears Pass instead. We also decided to come back on 285 which is very pretty and low traffic.

Because of the likely heat we tried to get electric hookups everywhere we could but didn't worry about it at the higher elevations campgrounds as those are usually tolerably cool even in July.

We had a great time with many adventures. I will try to relate them in the following posts.