Boondocking near Grand Lake, CO

August 16

Martha and I left home for a short 4-5 camping trip in the Arapahoe National Forest National Recreation Area near the town of Grand Lake.

We were barely starting to climb the foothills west of Denver on I-70 when the decision was made to unhook the towed Honda CRV as the RV was struggling to maintain 40 mph!

We didn't want to strain the engine/transmission and it had been the plan to unhook before Berthoud Pass Rd further on anyways.

Thus, we drove separate vehicles all the way up to the junction with US40 and from there North to Winter park, Fraser, Tabernash and Grandby.  We were shooting for this first camping along county Road 4 AKA Stillwater Pass Road.

We met up at the junction of US40 and US34 which takes you to Grand Lake and thence to the western entrance to the Rocky Mountain National Park.  (Our primary goal this trip).

After a bit of driving around with the CRV, we found ourselves a site damn close to where we had left the RV parked!  There were more campers that we had expected so we had kept going further and further in, in the end ending up less than a quarter mile from where we left the RV. 

All's well that ends well.

It's a nice, single rig site and no possibility of someone thinking there's room for more as opposed to a couple of group sites we'd seen before.

August 17

We spent most of the morning touring the Western half of the Trail Ridge Road parkway. Stopping at the Alpine Visitor Center for Martha to get her stamp in the Parks Passport book. 

It's the highest visitor center in the US Park System 

We managed to climb to the top of this incline:

Yep, that's the visitor center down there:

A little further east from the visitor center there's another good spot for pictures, it was quite popular: 

Here's a view of Mt. Baker from Coyote Valley:

We toured the Village of Grand Lake in the afternoon, nothing significant to report, just another tourists trap town in the mountains.  Nice, but meh.

I rode Yagi, my tw200, a couple of times up and down Forest Road 120, The longest Ride being about 17 miles round trip. The charging system kept working as hoped for, so perhaps the latest round of fixes will do the trick in terms of the sporadic no charging conditions. 

As you can see, the area is barely starting to recover from the massive fire that hit the Granby area years ago. 

August 18

Mostly overcast skies basically convince us to return home a day early. Martha left in the CRV a few hours before I did as I was doing some chores on the RV.