Boondocking near Turquoise Lake, CO

Martha and I drove Umarang, the URRV, out to Turquoise Lake yesterday.  About three and a half hours and we were free of the cesspool that is the Metro Denver area.  Probably could have made it here in three hours but construction on the I-70 Superslab slowed things to a crawl several times.

After a brief mis-routing by googlemaps, we finally found the right entry road to a dispersed camping area near Turquoise Lake, about five miles east of Leadville, CO.

Found ourselves a pretty good spot though you can still hear the cars drive by as they head to/from the lake's roadway.

Campsite altitude: 9800 Feet

It's National Forest Dispersed Camping, very close to a private RV Park called Sugar Loafing RV Park I think.

That's Mount Massive in the above picture's background, the second highest Fourteener in Colorado and #15 in North America.

After breakfast and once it had warmed up a bit from the 40°F (4.4°C) overnight low temperature, we geared up in layers and headed out to explore the nearby lake.

We tried several scenic overlooks as we circumnavigated the lake but the best views were from the Shimmering Point Overlook, a short hike is involved, easy on the way down and bit of a breathing strain on the way back up.  We were after all, above 10,000 ft at this point!

photo courtesy of Martha

After checking out all the overlooks, we headed into Leadville to see what we could see.  Traffic was light as it was a weekday and we meandered for a bit, checking out Main Street and some of the murals that catch the eye:

photo courtesy of Martha

 Tabor Opera House

I believe it was County Road 4 that we took out of town, we neared the Mount Massive Golf Course and checked out the views of this fourteener.

A gnat managed to fly in under Martha's helmet visor and lodge in her right eye so we had to stop at this spot for me to get it out from under her lower eyelid.

photo courtesy of Martha

Got back to the URRV in time for lunch and we spent the afternoon relaxing in the warm sunshine and temperatures.  Fiona is doing great, there was some mushy action on the part of the newly refurbished sidecar shock absorber but I guess it finally got enough oil in the right spots and started doing its job.