Grand Lake to Dinosaur National Monument

The moose encounters continue. I woke up early (like 5:30) and could hear noises but I didn’t remember if it was a bear sound or a moose sound. There was a bear in the campground the night before and it got into a cooler a few campsites down. We have been very careful to pack EVERYTHING back into the truck including all food, drinks, and even toothpaste, so I wasn’t too worried that the bear would get in to our tent. I finally had to get up and use the restroom and when I did, I saw one of these babies eating branches on the side of campground road a couple sites away. Another couple was standing in the road right outside our campsite looking at it too. Where was the mother? We didn’t dare walk by it in case we came in between them. We ended up cutting through someones campsite to go around to the parking lot. Sure enough, the mother wasn’t too far away. When I came back to the campsite, Mom and babies were snacking right across from our campsite. I sat down and watched them for about 20 minutes. The babies were chasing each other back and forth while the mom munched away. Finally they settled down in the same spot we found them when we got to the campsite. It was magical. 

If you EVER go to Rocky Mountain National Park and plan to camp out, you should definitely go to Elk Creek Campground in Grand Lake. Best campground experience ever!

We saw a sign and took it down a gravel road. The road eventually led to a dead end but the view was spectacular! It was open range which is common out here even along the main highways. But this cow was very near the side of the road and couldn’t figure out what we were doing there. I was wondering that myself, but we did bring the truck so we could go off-roading.

Some of the grades on the highways we traveled were 8% grade which was pretty steep. We saw a semi that had smoking breaks at the bottom of one such stretch of road. In order to prevent death by careening off a mountain, the highway department created these runaway truck ramps so the semis can go onto them. They are full of sand and go slightly uphill so it slows the semi down. The boys thought that was pretty cool.

We stopped at Steamboat Springs for lunch. Jeff used to ski here every winter so we went to the ski hill to take the gondola up to the top of the mountain. The ski hill caters to mountain bikers and hikers during the summer and had an area of things for the kids to do. An employee handed us free ride passes and Carson chose to do this! 

He jumped about 3 times and got pretty high in the air before he was done and wanted to stop. We were pretty impressed that he even wanted to try it!

After the jumping trampoline ride, we rode the gondola up to the top of the mountain. This was Spencer’s favorite thing and he was snapping pictures like crazy. 

The gondola only goes about halfway up so here is a picture of the rest of the mountain.

We had lunch and the family posed for a picture on an unused chairlift, then rode the gondola back down. The boys wanted to ride it again, so Jeff took them up and then down while I went to the one shop that was open during the summer. 

Then we were back on the road until we got to Dinosaur National Monument Campground. No cute animals to greet us this time, but the bark on this large tree in our campsite was pretty interesting.

This was the view directly behind the campsite.

This was the view in front of our campsite. There was rain heading our way so the clouds were pretty thick.

We all went to the Ranger talk after supper. She talked about bats and was really interesting.  Rain started right at bedtime and it rained really hard a lot of the night. We were safe and dry in our tent and had a great night’s sleep.