2012/06 Western USA trip - Robbers' Roost |
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Saturday June 24th
There was no convenient and interesting spot to camp at the right distance, so this was going to be a long driving day. The plan was to camp near Woodland Park in Colorado, attend to laundry and haircut needs and then drive up to Pike’s Peak the next day. That’s the only place in North America where you can drive to over 14000 feet; the view is spectacular on a clear day.
I wanted to drive through Taos just to see what it’s like and maybe stop for lunch. The town is famous for its adobe architecture and for the Taos
art colony, including Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe. I was really surprised though by the beauty of the canyon of the Rio Grande. This is same river that separates Texas and Mexico, but this section is about 300 miles upstream from El Paso, so it’s a lot smaller. We stayed there for a while, watching rafters and kayakers. We noticed though that the road traffic was getting steadily heavier. Obviously, we were on a favourite weekend “drive up the canyon” for the people of Santa Fe, and where were they all going to end up? Taos for lunch!
Taos looked pretty if not authentic. With all the new buildings required (we guessed) to conform to the adobe architecture it looked a bit like a theme park. I would have liked to stop but the town looked to be very busy with little chance of parking a camper and trailer, so we kept going.
From Taos it was a long drive north across New Mexico into Colorado, with the day steadily getting hotter. Pueblo is the biggest town, unappetizing with its derelict steel mills. Just north of there we saw a sign that Highway 24 was closed because of a fire. I realized that this was our road to Woodland Park but if the fire was beyond there we’d still be OK. We’d not been listening to any news so we didn’t know that the western USA was in a severe drought or that this fire on 24 was massive, destroying hundreds of homes in Waldo Canyon on the outskirts of Colorado Springs.
As we got closer though it was obvious that this was a big fire, close to the freeway, and there’d be no point in driving up the mountain to go see the view. It was a smoky 42C (107F) in Colorado Springs. We would have to take the next road to the west, but there aren’t many to choose from in mountain country and we ended up going all the way to Denver and taking the I-70 freeway.
But where to camp? We gave up on the towns along the freeway as there had been an accident in the other direction and the towns were clogged with detoured traffic. Our books showed Arapaho, a national forest campground, on US40 just past Empire. There was a line-up for Empire’s only gas station so I postponed filling until the morning. The campground had gone, or rather it had been sold to some business, so we had to go on to the next one on the other side of Berthoud Pass. We ground our way up seemingly endless switchbacks to over 11000 feet, with our remaining fuel disappearing fast.
We found the Robbers Roost campground, tiny but with room for us. At nearly 10000 feet we no longer had a problem with the heat. Around the nearby stream it was icy cold. These were some of the flowers around the stream.