It was a series of mistakes on my part that lead us to Eldorado Canyon State Park in Colorado on this particular Sunday in June. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, we were up at the butt crack of dawn to watch the sunrise over Red Rocks Amphitheater. After that, we retired back to our AirBNB to get a little bit of rest.
Being so close to the mountains, I was itching to do some exploring, but I admittedly dropped the ball as our excursion leader. It turns out to get into most of the National Parks in the area (like Rocky Mountain National Park), you either need to get there before 9AM or you need to have a "Timed Pass".
Apparently the timed pass system is something the parks use to limit the amount of traffic in and out of a park at any given time. I'm sure @livinguktaiwan had to deal with this system on her recent trip, but it's something that slipped right past me.
Unfortunately, we had already missed the window for getting into the national park, so I started looking for state parks that we might be able to access. While the rest of our group was eating breakfast and falling back asleep after our morning trip, I was mad at work on my laptop trying to find a new destination for us.
Thinking back to my home state of Michigan, I realized while the national parks might have a timed pass system, getting into a state park might not be as difficult or complex.
Eventually, I settled on Eldorado Canyon State Park. It was just a short 30 to 45 minute drive away from Thornton where we were staying and the photos I found on Google Maps looked pretty stunning. I'm sorry to tell the folks in the #silvergoldstackers group that despite the name, we didn't find any legendary cities of gold here.
The six of us piled into my rented Ford Explorer and we made our way west towards the mountains.
Once we got outside of the city, the drive to Eldorado Canyon was actually quite beautiful. It was winding and twisty and all sorts of fun. My nieces (who apparently suffer from motion sickness) didn't enjoy it quite so much, but we all made it.
I pulled up to the park ranger station and the first thing the worker asked me was if I had a reservation. A what? This is a state park, I don't need a reservation do it? Sure enough, I did. The ranger explained that we could drive all the way back down to the closest town to get signal and apply for a pass or park down there and ride a shuttle up.
We were already here, I wasn't going to drive all the way back down the hill to the town. We turned around and found a local parking lot to apply for a timed vehicle pass. Let me tell you, it was quit the process. It took three people to figure it out and my brother in law had to enter all kinds of info including his SSN to finally get the pass.
Then we have our next problem... We got our pass for 11:00 AM and it was only about 10:30. Knowing the worker was clearly a stickler for the rules, we had little hope he would let us in before the 11:00 window. We sat in the parking lot waiting for someone to tell us we had to move waiting for 11:00 to come around.
At 10:55 we pulled up to the ranger station window hoping for the best. Once again he asked if we had a reservation. Yes we do! I don't think he even glanced at the QR code on our phone before he was handing us maps to the park and waving us through! Pretty funny!
We were finally in though!
We drove the very narrow road back into the park a bit before we found a place to park near the trail we had planned on hiking. There are miles of trails in Eldorado State Park, but we settled on The Fowler Trail. It looked pretty easy and considering it was only our second day in Colorado, we were a bit concerned about over exerting ourselves and altitude sickness.
You might think we were being silly, but the elevation of the town where @mrsbozz and I live is about 617 feet. Meanwhile the elevation of the town where our relatives live is about 900 feet. Eldorado Canyon ranges from 5800 feet to 8800 feet, so you can see that is a significant difference.
What we failed to take into consideration is that my oldest niece and my brother in law are deathly afraid of heights. As you can see in the photos above, there is a pretty pronounced edge to the trail and the drop is significant enough that it would hurt if you fell.
The Rattlesnake trail is an offshoot of the Fowler trail, but as you can see from the second photo above, it's a bit rougher and more demanding than the path we were on. We decided to skip it. Meanwhile, my brother in law and one niece hugged the edge of the cliff as close as they could to stay away from the other edge. You could sense their anxiety anytime someone would come from the other way and they had to get over.
The trail was actually quite busy. I forgot to mention yesterday that we saw ladies with weighted vests running up and down the stairs at Red Rocks. I understand why people come to Denver to train in the thinner altitude. It really gives your lungs a workout. We were on a pretty easy path and even I was getting a bit winded.
The other thing we failed to realize was that Eldorado Canyon State Park is apparently a huge destination for rock climbers. You can't see them in the first photo, but that second one is a zoom in of the first photo and you can clearly see some of the climbers. They were literally all over the rock faces as we were taking our hike.
About halfway down the trail was this huge rock slide area. It was crazy and impressive just how high up the rocks went.
I just realized how long this post is getting, so I am going to have to split it up into two parts. Don't worry, I have a ton more photos to share with you. You would have been scrolling all day if I didn't stop here. Tomorrow is Friday, so I will be doing my regular Friday Finance post, but check back Monday for the continuation of our time at Eldorado Canyon.
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