I woke up first and took a nice hot shower, drank some coffee, played on the internet a bit, repacked the van a bit and read my book for a while. Eventually the kids got up when they really had to pee. They ate and we packed up the tent and headed out.
It was a fairly easy curvy drive into the rockys. We stopped in some random town at some random park and cooked up some noodles and tuna and watched a frisbee game for lunch.
As we got into the park and started up the trailridge highest road ever deal through the park the weather got worse and worse but the animal sightings got better and better.
Finally we made it to the top and found more snow then anywhere else we had been.
It was only kind of cold but really raining when we started but actually got better as we got higher.
It had moved on by the time we got to the top.
We got to enjoy the view for about 2 minutes before Pumpkin was about to explode with pee.
So we did the most intelligent thing and just about ran down the wet snowy mountain. The last time I was on one of these top of Rockys hikes with Pumpkin she was strapped to my chest and had explosive poo inside my rain jacket so I didn’t mind the rush to the potty so much.
After the hike we drove on through the park watching all the Elk and deer. We even got stuck in some traffic that turned out to be a young moose. Eventually we made it to our campsite. It was not raining at the moment so we rushed to get the tent up.
Once it was up we did get rained on a bit and decided to have a snack in the tent.
The rain stopped before the soup was gone.
There was a trail out of the back of the empty campsite next to us so we checked it out. It was a steep climb up a hill.
But eventually leveled off in a really nice field with some boulders.
wildflowers
and more deer
We wondered around and followed the deer a while and then found a creek to follow back down.
We followed it past our campsite and eventually got to a river.
The river was crazy full and we watched it a bit before walking back to camp. At this point it started to sink in that it was our last night camping and we would be back in the real world soon enough. So we made sure to enjoy hanging around the campfire.
and cooking dinner
and making smores
The sky got darker and darker but we didn’t think it was that late. We decided to cram as much into the next day as we could so decided to get going early. Right after getting on pajamas, and getting ready for bed it rained and poured. It rained for a long time and I ended up turning off the 5:30am alarm figuring there would be too much clouds and rain to see the sunrise.