Dumont Lake--an Ocean of Wildflowers

Our next stop was Dumont Lake, which had been recommended to us by someone from Colorado that we met in Arizona. It was supposed to be good for wildflowers. That’s like saying Beethoven wrote some tunes. This was the Sistine Chapel of wildflowers. The pictures don’t do it justice, like they seldom do the fall colors of New England justice. We were camped in someone’s perennial garden that went on for miles in all directions. The flowers came up to our windows; we waded shoulder-deep in color.

Not continuously besotted with flowers, we did manage to visit Steamboat Springs, scene of a long-ago skiing trip, and do a couple hikes. The Rabbit Ears Peak hike was particularly satisfying and scenic (the trailhead was right in our campground). We could only stay 5 days here, needing to hustle off to meet our son, Jeff, and Katie in Dillon.

More of our Steamboat Springs area adventures on the Outdoor Project:

http://www.outdoorproject.com/adventures/hiking-backpacking/upper-fish-creek-falls
http://www.outdoorproject.com/adventures/hiking-backpacking/rabbit-ears-peak

Our campground at Dumont Lake

Dumont Lake

Dumont Lake and beetle damage on pine trees, common throughout Colorado

Camping in a wildflower garden

Upper Fish Creek Falls, near Steamboat Springs

Upper Fish Creek Falls

Dumont Lake sunset

On the Rabbit Ears Peak trail

Medicine Bow Mountains

We were kind of glad to leave Cheyenne and the trappings of what Wyoming calls civilization. We had a week planned in the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming, also called the Snowy Range. Just about no one knows about these mountains outside of people who live in southern Wyoming and die-hard outdoors folks in Colorado. It is a beautiful little mountain range near the Wyoming/Colorado border that you can drive right into the middle of at 11,000 feet. Imagine a slice of Yosemite high country dropped into the middle of nowhere with a good road through it. It is a real gem.

We camped at Brooklyn Lake, a tiny campground with its own traihead into the back country. There are about 130 lakes in the Snowy Range. We would easily pass 12-15 on a four-hour hike. The wildflowers were stupendous and there were many snowfields still frozen. We hiked a lot and the photos below are only a few examples of the many beautiful places we saw. I hiked to 12,013-foot Medicine Bow Peak the day before we left--my first high Rocky Mountain peak (though far from the difficulty of the “14ers”}.

These are truly lovely mountains and it is good to know that there are still places like this in our country. Places no one is making a buck on or visiting to death with tour buses. Places with absolutely no services and where people have been camping since their father took them there who was taken there by HIS father. We were very sad to leave.

See more of our Medicine Bow adventures on the Outdoor Project website:
http://www.outdoorproject.com/adventures/hiking-backpacking/shelf-lakes-gap-lakes-trail
http://www.outdoorproject.com/adventures/hiking-backpacking/lost-lake-trail
http://www.outdoorproject.com/adventures/hiking-backpacking/medicine-bow-peak-lewis-lake-trailhead
http://www.outdoorproject.com/adventures/hiking-backpacking/twin-lakes-sheep-lake-trail

Tucker likes hiking in the mountains

View from our campground

Sugarloaf Peak

Medicine Bow Peak

Shelf Lake

Medicine Bow Peak

Brooklyn Lake, near our campsite

Before dawn

Sunrise on Mirror Lake

Full moon setting over Mirror Lake

Medicine Bow crest

Land of Many Lake

View from the top of Medicine Bow Peak, 12,013 ft.

Cheyenne, Wyoming

In a bit of a change of pace for us, we had planned to spend a week near Cheyenne because we had tickets to see Keith Urban perform on the last night of Cheyenne Frontier Days.  Frontier Days is the biggest event of the year for Cheyenne (and maybe for the whole state of Wyoming) and they do a really good job of it.  The whole town really gets behind the ten days of festivities, which featured an authentic rodeo every other day, the Air Force Thunderbirds air show, a huge midway, an Indian village with performances by Wyoming dancers and musicians and a big parade.  We tried to do it all and really had fun there.  We camped about 1/2 hour out of town in a very nice state park and managed to do some hiking in addition to our trips to Cheyenne.  The Keith Urban concert was amazing as usual and the next day we headed out to one of the least-known mountain ranges in the country.  Wait 'till you see THAT place!

The whole town really did a great job on the parade

There were many antique wagons and cars...and lots of horses and mules

Cool horns!

Eating a buffalo burger at the rodeo....notice the hat

Steer wrestlers are truly crazy.  That is 700 pounds of beef he has to get on the ground!

The bucking bronco riders were only slightly less crazy

The Thunderbirds were spectacular, and we were so close

Tucker, enjoying the view of our campground

We hiked around North Crow Reservoir and had it almost to ourselves

Another view of our campground by Granite Springs Lake

Local Indian "Fancy Dancer" putting on a great show

Sunset from our campsite

Pawnee National Grasslands

Northeast of Denver, almost to the Wyoming border, is a large area of shortgrass prairie, the kind that once covered much of the midwest.  We had a few days before we were due to head up to Cheyenne, so we decided to camp out in this vast, flat area and take a break from the mountains for a while.

Not really a pristine area, the National Grasslands is a patchwork of ranches, open prairie and some oil and gas develoment.  It was really quite beautiful and in this very wet year, it was green and full of wildflowers.  We camped in a very quiet and lovely spot and took a drive over to the Pawnee Buttes for a hike.  The buttes are one of the few remnants of the prairie floor as it existed millions of years ago.  Almost all of that soft sandstone has eroded away, but a hard cap of rock protected the buttes from erosion, leaving the several-hundred-foot-high monoliths as they are today.   It was a very beautiful place and one that few people even know about, much less visit.

Our camping spot in the grasslands

A storm approaches

This creek is usually dry, but this year it is flooded

The Pawnee Butte trail

View of the buttes from a distance