Weekend in Denver

I spent the following weekend in the Denver metro area. This largely comprised wandering around the city's modern downtown and surrounding parks and neighborhoods as well a Saturday afternoon visit to Idaho Springs, a small, historic town about 40 minutes outside the city.

Roxborough State Park

After camping out at Chatfield State Park in Littleton, a suburb just south of Denver, I spent the next morning hiking around Roxborough State Park only a few miles away. Here enormous rust-colored sandstone ridges rise up out of the earth much like at Garden of the Gods, a park located an hour south in Colorado Springs.

Lake of Glass

As I made my way back from Wyoming to spend some time exploring the Denver area, I camped for a night at Arapahoe National Recreation Area, a reservoir just to the west of Rocky Mountain National Park. I got up early the next morning and drove Trail Ridge Road--the highest continuously paved road in the United States with a maximum elevation of 12,183 feet--through the park, stopping to gawk at numerous views along the way.

I continued on to the Glacier Gorge area of the park where I hiked out to The Loch and then on to Lake of Glass before heading to the suburbs north of Denver for the night. The trails in this popular part of the park were more crowded than I would have liked but the scenery was unbelievable nevertheless especially a few miles beyond the trailhead where the crowds thinned.

Thermopolis

After the Tetons, I drove a little over halfway back to Colorado, stopping for the night in Rawlins, Wyoming where I watched the US defeat Ghana in their first World Cup match. I made a detour on the way to Thermopolis, home of Wyoming's Hot Springs State Park. Here, visitors can soak in the mineral waters for free, but only for 20 minutes due to health concerns and the fact that the springs are state run.

Grand Teton National Park

The apex of my road trip--the farthest north and farthest west from where I started--was Grand Teton National Park in the northwest corner of Wyoming. The Tetons are famously a mountain range without foothills, rising thousands of feet almost vertically out of Jackson Hole's circular valley floor.

I arrived on a gloomy Saturday afternoon and immediately nabbed a campsite at the Jenny Lake campground. Although it was almost 6 p.m. I had been on the road all day and wanted to stretch my legs. I hiked halfway around the lake to Hidden Falls then on to Inspiration Point as clouds rolled by overhead, releasing a light but frigid rain.

After a chilly night and an early morning campsite visit from an antlered elk, I hiked as far as a could into Death Canyon until snow ten feet deep blocked the trail. Before I began the hike, I was given a GPS tracker as part of a study to understand better how visitors use the park.

Next, I drove in to the city of Jackson where I enjoyed a warm meal and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. I returned to the park that afternoon and stayed overnight in the Gros Ventre campground.

I awoke early the next day to take in sunrise at the Mormon Barns, a favorite spot for photographers to congregate. A handful of them were poised there that morning with their tripods and expensive cameras waiting for the sun's rays to pierce the morning clouds and strike the mountains. They laughed at me talking pictures with my iPhone. I laughed back at them taking a picture that's been snapped a million times before.

Before beginning my drive back to Colorado, I stopped at a few more distant overlooks of the craggy, jutting peaks and hiked the couple miles to Grand View Point, overlooking Two Ocean and Emma Matilda Lakes to the east. One of the rangers I'd spoken with when I arrived said it was her favorite hike in the park. I came away impressed, but not nearly as awed as I'd been by Death Canyon the day before.

Flaming Gorge

Flaming Gorge, so named by explorer John Wesley Powell in 1869 for its ruby red walls, was dammed in the 1960s to generate hydroelectric power and today is a 91-mile long reservoir stretching from northern Utah to southern Wyoming. I stopped there on Saturday morning on my way north to Grand Teton National Park.