In this post, I'm squeezing two locations into one post because these are almost the same. I have done several posts in the near past about the Aspen and Independence Road area of Colorado. On a new day, we drove back up Independence Road a bit because there were a couple of places we wanted to visit but did not have enough time to make it in the previous day.
There is a lake Weller and there should be a trail that leads to it through the forest. It wasn't a long hike, about 10 minutes up a forested mountain trail. I was a bit on edge because there are a ton of bears in this area. So I was actively scanning the surroundings.
Soon enough we were next to the lake. There were a lot of huge rocks everywhere. We sat down for a bit, enjoyed the view and took some photos.
Since we didn't have a whole lot of time, we had to get going back. We had to make it to another trail and then had a lot of driving to be done.
This is how the trail looked.
We drove a couple of minutes up the Independence Road and arrived at another trailhead. The Grottos trail. It looks pretty much the same as the forested area to the Weller Lake but this trail had cool rock formations and abysses. Once there were glaciers and movement of these sculpted rock surfaces that appear so smooth today.
Those deep crevasses are carved by rivers over many thousands of years.
We walked back alongside the river that gushed down from the mountains.
A bit downriver there was a steeper section where the river really got fast-moving and formed some waterfalls.
For me, it was cool to look at how over many many years the water had been shaping these rocks.
Now we had a ton of driving to do. About 5 or 6 hours or something. Aspen area is located quite in the middle of Colorado but we had to drive to the west of the state, very close to the Utah border, That area is pretty much a desert but with some extremely cool places I'm gonna blog about soon!