Paul Gets High
May 27, 2024 — Day 74
Yampa River State Park, Hayden Colorado — Curt Gowdy State Park, Cheyenne Wyoming
Today was high altitude day. As such, you don’t get any photos. Let’s just say the drive from Hayden, CO to Walden, CO was really nice. But we were both busy driving the Jeep and RV so no pictures! We did it this way because we were going up and over some big mountains and lightening the RV’s load is wise. To that end we also dumped tanks and carried only a half tank of water. Paul did set a new high score of 9,564 feet. Here’s the elevation and gradient chart. The green line on the chart is approximately where Walden CO is located.
This is the view from right before Walden. Real mountains with real snow! From looking at maps those are in the 11,000 to 13,000 foot range.
We reattached in Walden, Colorado. There wasn’t anything special about it except that it had a nice visitors center with a big dirt parking lot where we could stop to eat lunch and hook up the Jeep to the RV.
Check out the cool and very photogenic Union Pacific caboose we lunched next to. Notice how photogenic it is? Notice how the above shot is eerily similar to the Google Street View shot. Wonder why that is? Could both of your favorite photographers and travelers have forgetten to make the shot?
Downtown Walden was cute.
We passed through the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge, which was beautiful.
Check out this stange hillside, trees on one side, scrub grass on the other. It must be because of the prevailing winds.
This was prettier than the photo shows, the line of trees on the left just glowed.
Soon we began the really scary descents. This one was 7% down with curves and sometimes steep drop offs.
We started seeing a lot of these “things.”
At first we thought it was the last of the snow. But they were all sitting out in the open and not on the north side of a hill where you usually see the last of the snow. Susan did some googling and some of them were certainly salt flats. But we think that most were man-made especially the one with the remains of a tarp sticking out. The road crews must dump piles of road salt periodically so it is easy to access.
We happily pulled into the Curt Gowdy State Park through a very large and very fancy gate.
The park is huge. It’s 5.3 sq mi. The Visitors Center appeared to be new and it’s enormous. But this is where things take a turn and not for the good. The sites had beautiful views. We struggled to find a level site, some were over 20″ off level, our magic level measurer stops at 20″. (susan here: we also didn’t have nearly enough blocks to level the RV, a first!) We did find one, and one with a nice view and it was the only concrete pad that we could see. So we called the Visitors Center and asked for a site change.
We don’t normally travel with a full water tank unless we know we’ll be boon docking for a couple days then we roll with a full tank. We thought there’d be water there so it didn’t matter that we were about 40% full. We looked at a few of their maps but we never did find water. It’s fairly common to have only an electric hookup and no water at your site. But we’ve never seen a park that didn’t have water anywhere! Maybe we missed it, we probably did. We were glad to have enough water for the evening and next day. It did make us wonder if people show up expecting potable water to be available.
Daily: 173
Total: 5,626
Driving Miles/Day: 225
Overall Miles/Day: 77
mpg: 6.82