Gorgeous Royal Gorge and Lots of Rain in Mueller State Park

Welcome to another recap of our trip in the beginning of the summer. Today is my brother’s birthday, so I will dedicate this post to him. Happy Birthday, Jesse!

I wanted to see the Royal Gorge Bridge, and despite some advice to the contrary, it made the most sense to spend the night in Canon City and see the Bridge first thing in the morning. After seeing Crested Butte and Ouray it was a bit of a disappointment arriving in Canon City. (Sorry, Canon City people!)

We stayed at an inexpensive roadside motel with great reviews, which I would say were overblown. It was fine, but I wish we might have shelled out a little more money, or perhaps just camped along the highway somewhere. Oh well! Not all itinerary options will be perfect.

Anyway, we had dinner in the downtown area at a place called World’s End Brewery, and then watched a silly TV show starring Arnold Schwarnegger on the computer.

Day 13: We woke up and found a coffee shop called Cafe Belay, which was terrific: delicious coffee, awesome breakfast burritos, and a fun vibe. We loved the coffee shop and it raised our opinion of Canon City and put us in really good moods.

Next we drove the Skyline Drive, which was actually pretty terrifying and worth doing if you have somebody who is okay driving on sccary roads. It was on our way out of town and we thought it was worth doing. There was a part where you could see dinosaur footprints. It’s insane to try to think about being somewhere where dinosaurs actually walked!

These are dinosaur footprints, the bumpy parts, apparently!

Skyline Drive. It’s one way, and we had parked and walked up a little trail to get more view.

Next we headed to the Royal Gorge Bridge. Despite knowing it was a big tourist trap, we definitely enjoyed our stay. We beat the crowds by 1) getting there early and 2) being early in the season. You pay an entrance fee to get up close, and that gets you the gondola ride as well. You can also pay extra for other activites like rock climbing and zip lining, but we thought we had spent enough.

The Royal Gorge Bridge, an engineering marvel!

We got there right before the gondolas opened, and realized we should probably take the gondola across first, and then walk back, since there weren’t any crowds yet.

The gondola ride was great–it was super fun to ride across and look down. My fear of heights usually doesn’t extend to mechanical things, as I have more faith in them than my own ability not to trip and fall.

You get off the gondola on the other side, and you could ride back, but we wanted to walk, so we headed down the hill to the other side of the bridge. They make you walk by some other paid attractions, just in case you change your mind too. We stopped in to see the movie, which was interesting, except it had a character that was really geared towards kids and was super annoying, so I would rate it as a mixed thing, and would have preferred just to learn more about the bridge and gorge without the weird kid part.

When you walk across the bridge you get some amazing views.

The bridge is lined with flags from all of the states. This is Missouri’s.

Anyway, we had a little ice cream snack on the other side of the bridge and then decided to head out. Our next stop was Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. As usual, the drive there was beautiful!

I didn’t know too much about Florissant Fossil Beds except that it was close to where we were going, and it looked worth doing. We started with a picnic lunch, and then headed into the Visitor’s Center to watch a movie and look at the museum. In a nutshell, there are a lot of fossils there as well as petrified tree stumps.

We took a path named The Petrified Forest Loop to see various stumps, including the largest one, aptly named The Big Stump.

The Big Stump from a distance, it was the real highlight!

Anyway, we walked around the path, but a storm looked like it was headed our way, so we thought we might should move on. (What is my grammar here?) We headed over by car to see the Hornbeck Homestead, in a nearby but different part of the park as well.

Our home for the next two nights would be a campsite at Mueller State Park, so we headed there next to set up, hoping that the rain would hold off. It did, enough for us to set up, but then it rained, and poured.

Our site was gorgeous. It would have had a view of Pikes Peak except for the cloud cover, and it honestly might have been the best site in the entire park. But it was raining, and all our plans involved the outdoors, so decided to head to a nearby brewery for a drink and maybe food.

We initially thought the rain was letting up, and as we drove out of the campground we saw a double rainbow, and immediately pulled over to take photos.

It was amazing to see!

The rain continued however, and we had a nice dinner at Paradox Brewery Company. We returned to the campsite before it got too dark, and it did finally stop raining long enough for us to get a little fire going.

Mueller State Park was at about 9600 feet of elevation, and it was cold. In retrospect we should have brought our mummy bags, but we didn’t. It was a chilly night of sleep!

Day 14: The next morning we had a reservation to drive up Pikes Peak. It was damp and cold in the morning and we decided to skip cooking at the campsite and get a coffee on the way instead. We had to throw away some trash at a trashcan with a chain to move to keep it bear safe, and the chain was covered in ice, so that tells you how cold it was. We stopped at a coffee shop, Righteous Grounds Coffee Roasters and got some coffees plus some scones right from the oven. I had been joking on our walk in that I was hungry and didn’t care what we ate, and Louie had said he was just going to ask for two human rations for breakfast. But then they pulled out the freshly baked scones and we figured that sounded pretty good!

Anyway, we got to Pikes Peak but they told us that the peak wasn’t open due to the weather (blizzard conditions up top!). They led us to believe that it might open later, and we figured we might as well drive up as far as we could, so we did.

It was a nice drive with some lovely views, but we got to the end of where they had the road blocked and yup, we couldn’t pass further. We could see up higher that the snow was blowing quite a lot. Yes, snow, and yes, we were wearing coats by this point.

The road went over that ridge ahead of us and you can see the snow blowing around.

Disappointed, we drove back down. We headed towards Colorado Springs and the Garden of the Gods next. What a different landscape!

The traffic was crazy, so we decided to pull over and park and set off on foot. You can just drive through Garden of the Gods and see a lot, but you would be in bumper to bumper traffic, which wasn’t super appealing. We did a loop trail I found on All Trails, which covered the Palmer, Buckskin-Charley, Niobrara and Bretag Trails. It was about 4 miles, fairly flat, and was a great way to see Garden of the Gods!

I’m pretty sure the biggest mountain there is Pikes Peak.

After our hike, we were hungry again (the scones didn’t have a huge amount of lasting power) so we looked for a nice restaurant in nearby Manitou Springs. I found a cool looking vegetarian place called Adam’s Mountain Cafe, and we really enjoyed our meal there! The rest of Manitou Springs, not as much. We parked and walked around downtown (my knee was hurting me a bit by this point from all the hiking) and it was overcrowded and very tourist trap like. The springs were cool, but we just didn’t love the place, and after a bit decided to get out as it just wasn’t making us happy.

It starting raining on our way back and we decided to just go to Paradox Brewing Company again for dinner: pizza and beer this time. It had been really busy at Paradox the night before but this night was totally different, less busy, very chill, and we loved it again. Louie decided to buy a Paradox T-Shirt to commemorate our times there.

We were able to make a fire again at our campsite, and the nice thing about the campsite was that the gravel bottom of it kept the tent nice and dry, but sadly still absolutely freezing. We brought more clothes into the tent and did our best to stay warm that night, but it was still a chilly night!

Day 15: It was raining in the morning a bit, but the rain let up finally and we decided we’d better pack up the tent while we could! It was funny: under the tent was completely dry (tiny gravel ground cover for the win) but the tent was damp: of COURSE the last place we camp was raining so we had to pack everything up wet. Oh well, we had had good luck with the weather before Mueller and at least the scenery was beautiful.

We decided we couldn’t leave without doing a hike, so we went for a hike! It was a little rainy seeming, but it let up pretty quickly and we had a nice hike through the woods. We took a loop sort of trail from Revenuer’s Ridge to the Lost Pond, and felt at the end that we had accomplished something and gotten a good look at Mueller State Park.

We would love to return there to camp again and go to Paradox Brewery, and maybe try Pikes Peak again! Oh, and we stayed in site #42, but don’t tell everybody, it IS the best site! (Near pit toilets though, not real bathrooms, but there are bathrooms a short drive or long walk away. and the pits were well maintained, probably because so many neighbors had RV’s.)

That’s where I will leave you. Next we will head to Breckenridge and Frisco for the day and one night, and then to Vail for Louie’s conference.