Colorado Vacation: The Highlights

The main difference between our two week vacation and the rest of our trip is that this bit doesn’t involve working. Or not too much anyway. The rest of it is kind of the same… hiking, biking, paddling, camping, eating and drinking. Only now we get to spend all day doing it 🙂

Overall, very impressed with Colorado. Some of the highlights from our hols:

Rocky Mountain National Park

Hiking in RMNP was a high alpine treat, complete with a rather close encounter with a fat furry marmot (not quite a bear or a moose but I’ll take it). This was also our first real taste of snow. Hence the only entry to make it into the highlights AND the not-so highlights.

Crested Butte

Cute little tiny town, they closed down part of their Main Street recently to allow for additional outdoor restaurant seating. Can recommend the Secret Stash pizza and also a place that does pasties, nom nom. Great hiking and bike riding right from town.

Plus one of the most amazing hikes we’ve done this year along nearby Scarp Ridge. I love the 360 views you get from a ridge hike and this one didn’t disappoint.

Ooh and Darren did a rather adventurous paddle down the Slate River at Crested Butte. Think shallow water. And rapidly moving water. And rocks. All of the above. Therefore also involved a bit of kneel down paddle boarding.

Ouray

Blasted through this town for an afternoon. Just time enough for a taste of the ‘Perimeter hike’. This trail skirts the mountains around the town, the entire time with a view down to the town encapsulated within a mountain amphitheater. Just gorgeous.

Telluride

Most other hikes we’ve done involved a 2 mile hike up through the forest to get to the more open exposed section (which is the bit where you start to get the views). Telluride has a gondola which gets you above all that. Not only that but a FREE gondola (the only one of its kind in the US). And from then on, views galore. And then there’s the wildflowers, OMG the wildflowers! I’m loving the wildflowers. Absolutely the best hiking so far.

And according to Darren, some pretty good mountain biking too.

Basecamp time

So happy that we have our home away from home. It’s so damn cosy for those chilly nights and there’s nothing like beers around the campfire after a hard day’s recreating! Rustled up a few nice meals along the way too, even if I do say so myself.

Harvest Hosts

Ah, gotta love the ability to stay at non-campground places that are happy for you to park at overnight with our annual HH membership. Our first on this trip was Mountain View Winery near Olathe, CO. So this wine region is no Napa Valley but what they lack in refinement, they make up for in rural charm. Not to mention the company of the four-footed residents. Old Seamus the 15 year old mongrel lab who may not be long for this world, a sausage dog with small dog issues, and Tiddlywinks the exuberant wolfhound, who didn’t think twice about bounding over the table where your wine is placed. A few near misses there.

Another Harvest Host was Stoneyard Distillery, Dotsoro, CO, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. They’ve got a good thing going as they have ample parking and allow up to four RVs (whereas most others only allow one). They distill from beet sugar, their concoctions quite unusual, and in addition to working our way through a tasting of shots, the proprietor was more than happy to rustle up a few cocktails.

Their most unusual spirit was still in the making. A jam jar of intriguing layered contents sat by the bar, with cacao nibs settled on the bottom, cocoa butter above and topped with a light coffee colored liquid. Turns out this is going to be a cacao spirit fit to blow your head off, with high intensity cacao flavor emulsified into their 176 Proof spirit. A whopping 88% ABV. Yes you read that right. We were treated to a preview taster by way of a pipette!