Tiff & Jared's adventures

Day 1: Fort Collins. Our first city in Colorado, we stopped here for some breweries before driving to Rocky Mountain. The big letdown was that New Belgium brewery was closed, a huge, funky looking massive beer haven. Oh well, we went to another good one we had on our list – Odell’s! We split some tasters on their patio; probably one of the coolest breweries we’ve been to. They had free tours every hour so we did a 30 minute tour of the brewery and got some free beer at the end! After that, we walked around downtown Fort Collins for a bit. There were lots of repurposed brick buildings and outdoor restaurants, really nice area! 

Around early afternoon, we left to drive to RMNP, our first night camping. We made it to Moraine Campground around five. Our site was a little tedious to say the least. We parked and had to walk about 500 feet to what looked like the most remote part of the campground. It didn’t help that they said they were having black bear problems (luckily no scary bear stories). After Lugging all of our sleeping bags, the tent, blankets etc, we made a nice Caesar salad (courtesy of Trader Joe’s) on our camp kitchen and got ready for bed. After driving two days straight, we were pretty pooped! We passed out probably by 9:30pm. 

Day 2: hiking in the glorious RMNP. We woke up around 7:30, packed up and headed up to Bear’s Lake. On our way out of the campground, we saw our first RMNP animal- and a fox! Good thing we got to the trailhead when we did because the parking lot was filled by 8:30. We filled our pack with lunch, lots of water, sunscreen etc and my stuffed animal (trying to become Instagram famous @doggy_gone_wild). ;). The ranger was super informant and told us the hike we planned on doing to Lake Odessa wasn’t even possible because there was still too much snow. HAHA WHAT? 

True, there was so much snow. We decided to do the hike but go to the lake before Odessa. All in all it was only an 8 mile round trip hike but it felt so much longer because of the altitude  (11,000 feet) and the crazy amount of snow still on the ground. At one point through the hike, we had to cross this snow mass and had trouble connecting back to the trail! For goodness sake, we are in June and had a snowball fight!! I’m glad we pushed on though because the view from where we ended up was beautiful. We were able to see two different alpine lakes, waterfalls from the melting snowfall on adjacent mountains and lush greenery. We even had two marmots creep on us while we were snacking! After lounging up there for a while and resting, we proceeded back to the base of the trail. 

Once we got all cleaned up, we started to head towards Trail Ridge Road. This is the longest paved highway in America, with heights upwards of 12,000 feet! It was really cool driving along it because we could see the different layers of ecosystems, the mountain alpine level, subalpine and alpine level.

Once you get o the alpine level at 11,500, you could tell because the trees literally stopped growing. It was beautiful to still see snow on the tallest peaks. Once we got to the end of the road and started getting back to normal elevation, we were headed out of the park. 

Of course, you don’t fully experience a national park until you see the more obscure wildlife. Driving past Coyote Valley, we saw a huge herd of elk grazing in a pasture along the road. The elk in the park were once so hunted that they were almost eradicated from the park until Yellowstone elk were introduced into the park (fun fact). Their numbers began to grow rapidly as their predators were also hunted, the grizzly and wolves (sad fact). 

Happy at the fact we saw some wildlife, we continued on not more than a mile until we saw a bunch of cars pulled over. IT WAS A FREAKING MOOSE, and a male on top of that!! I’ve been hoping to see a moose for years as they’re super reclusive creatures and only emerge around dawn and dusk to eat willows from ponds or lakes. This one was massive and chomping on some vegetation not thirty feet below us. Absolutely incredible. 

After taking probably fifty pictures, we finally left the park and made it to our campground in Grand Lake. The location was perfect, right near the lake we kayaked on. The owners informed us that moose have been frequenting the camp lately and we should be on the lookout around dusk or dawn. Not two hours after we set up shop, we saw another male moose!! This one was a juvenile with smaller antlers than the one we saw earlier. We watched it for a while as it eventually moved into our campsite – literally ten feet from our tent. So cool!! Unfortunately we didn’t see any more moose when we woke up, but at 10AM we made our way to downtown Grand Lake to launch our kayak for an hour. We were wearing sweatshirts because it was cool and windy but the scenery was breathtaking! We had lunch on the beach before packing up for the next stop: Glenwood Springs!